WILD DUCKS FLYING BACKWARD

Known for his comic/serious novels – “intellectual” and “anti-intellectual” at the same time – Tom Robbins has also published some short texts – travel articles, essays and commentaries on actors, musicians, sex bombs and intellectuals, which have appeared in various magazines, as well as a series of mostly unpublished poems. “Wild Ducks Flying Backward”, a rich anthology compiled for the first time, is a rare survey of the eclectic sensibility of a writer who describes himself as a “romantic hedonist of Zen” and a “stray dog in the dining rooms of culture”. Robbins’ short texts sometimes praise the Doors’ rock sound, other times they depoliticize Picasso’s Guernica, sometimes they lament the angst-ridden contemporary literature, and sometimes drool over a tomato sandwich or a kind of woman he calls the “genius waitress.” They often exhibit the traits we find in his novels: perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, a mystical but keenly observant eye, and an immense love of language.