New books by Tom Robbins AND Kurt Vonnegut

I just ordered Wild Ducks Flying Backward, a new book by Tom Robbins, AND A Man Without A Country which is the new book by Kurt Vonnegut.

For this, at least, now is a good time to thank the Universe.

 

Thank you universe.

 

A collection of Robbins short stories, eh? curledup.com doesn't like it.


"Does creativity really dry up virtually overnight? Impossible to think so. But read this, Villa Incognito, and Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (where you could sense dementia setting in), and then read the heartbreakingly wondrous Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas. And you tell me - can creativity really dry up virtually overnight?"

But, then, I liked Villa Incognito. We'll see.

 

i liked fierce invalids actually....he just makes me laugh....

 

I'm interested in hearing what you think of your new purchases, especially the Vonnegut. My local library doesn't have either of them yet.

Good reading!

 

Well, A Man Without A Country is really 150 pages or so of Vonnegut doing what he does best, observing the world we live in and writing about it with his singular insight. It seems that he holds little hope for humanity, as a whole, to understand or correct our habitual destructive instincts, and yet he takes great delight in the individual human being. He offers no story to hold it all together, but with all respect, I think he has earned the right to be the Old Man Talking.

Wlid Ducks Flying Backward is a compilation of pieces Tom Robbins wrote for various publications over the past 30 years. Now, I am a huge Tom Robbins fan, but I found this collection to be inconsistently inspired and I sometimes found it uncharacteristically challenging to shift gears between one piece and the next. There are enough pieces, however (most notably the tributes to Joseph Campbell, Terrence McKenna, The Sixties, Thomas Pynchon, and a few others), that are just delightful. For these pieces alone it is well worth owning a copy of the book. I do, however, look forward to his next novel.