Synopses & Reviews
Fiction. "The National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner poet goes narrative with a vast pantheon of dimensional characters and quiet fables. Once upon a time the 44 stories in this collection would have been called short-shorts or "sudden" fiction. In general, Tate's lovely little pieces transcend the objectives of synopsis .... there are sadistic cocker spaniels, abandoned llamas, seductresses, presidents, power-mongers, horny doctors, Tourette's victims, the dying, the dead, and the catatonic, both emotional and literal. These characters are not writers in disguise; they're real people, their language is real, and their tales have a kind of stealth lyricism Tate is brave enough to avoid standard narrative pyrotechnics, and there are shades of Paul Bowles, Grace Paley, and sometimes Raymond Carver. After appearing for years in small journals, these wonderful pieces have been brought together in a delicious smorgasbord" -- Kirkus Review.
Review
"Tate is a blunt, sharp narrator who takes his stories in unexpected directions, and his talent for brevity surfaces in the many short-short entries that pack a powerful conceptual wallop in the space of a few pages." Publishers Weekly, starred review
Review
"These characters are not writers in disguise; they're real people, their language is real, and their tales have a kind of stealth lyricism, these are stories only in the sense that they are narratives: plot is just a sheen, their soul is poetry." Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Synopsis
The 44 stories of Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee—long-awaited by fans of Tate’s poetry—will come as a welcome surprise to readers unfamiliar with his previous work. Tate seems both awed and bemused by small town life, with its legends, flights of fancy, heightened emotions, tragedies and small ruptures in the fabric of ordinary existence.
Synopsis
The first collection of stories by beloved Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winning poet James Tate received starred reviews in Kirkus and Publishers' Weekly, and will appeal to fans of his poetry and followers of American fiction alike.
Synopsis
In Child Made of Sand, Kingsley Tufts-winner Thomas Lux demonstrates a restless energy to explore new territory while confirming his place in the pantheon of contemporary American poetry.
Synopsis
Readers familiar with Thomas Luxs quick-witted images ("Language without simile is like a lung/ without air") and his rambunctious, Cirque-Du-Soleil-like imagination ("The Under-Appreciated Pontooniers") will find in his new collection, Child Made of Sand, not only the signature funny, provocative, and poignant super-surrealism that has made him, along with Charles Simic, James Tate, and Dean Young, one of Americas most inventive and humane poets, but they will also find in a surprising series of homages, elegies, rants, and autobiographical poems a new register of language in which time and mortality echo and reverberate in quieter notes. In "West Shining Tree," we can hear this shift in register when he asks: "Ill head dead West and ask of all I see:/ Which is the way, the long or the short way,/ to the West Shining Tree?"
About the Author
James Tate is the author of thirteen books of poetry, and the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee is his first collection of stories.
Table of Contents
I
The Moths Who Come in the Night to Drink Our Tears 3
The Little Three-Handed Engine That Could 4
The Chairman of Naught 6
You and Your Ilk 7
The Drunken Forest 8
The Underappreciated Pontooniers 9
Nietzsche Throws His Arms Around the Neck of a Dray Horse 10
Scriptus Interruptus 11
A Frozen Ball of Rattlesnakes 12
The Queen of Truth 13
A Delivery of Dung 14
II
Elegy 19
Since Death and Its Sequelae 20
Every Time Someone Masturbates God Kills a Kitten 22
West Shining Tree 23
From Whom All Blessings Flow 24
The Probabilist 26
Rue de la Vieille Lanterne 27
Like Tiny Baby Jesus, in Velour Pants, Sliding down
Your Throat (A Belgian Euphemism) 28
Not the Same Kind of Mud as in “Two Tramps in Mud Time” 30
Ermine Noose 31
Why 32
III
Madsong 35
The Riverine Farmers 36
The Anti-Lunarian League 38
Penultimatum 39
Boy Born with Small Knife in His Head 40
Graves Rented by the Hour 41
Dendrochronologist Blues 42
The Goldfish Room (Where the Cops
Beat You in the Head with a Phonebook) 44
The River of Nuts 46
Baby Madsong 48
IV
Hatrack 51
Fishing 52
Soup Teachers, 54
The Hunchback Farmhand 55
Ladys Slipper 56
Bricks Sinking in Deep Water 57
Dead Horse 58
Fox 60
A Walk in the Woods with Shotguns 62
Outline for My Memoir 64