Exploring terrain charted by Richard Ford and Raymond Carver, the stories in this first collection are confident and ruefully funny as they examine what might be called post-postmacho manhood.
She should appeal to many fans of Jane Kenyon, but the disillusioned voice in this third collection brings her closer to Thomas Hardy.
In this fourth collection, Hofmann has complicated his relationship to his novelist father... the sadness intrinsic to familial anger pervades a new group of thirteen poems about "kleiner Papa".
Many of the characters in this first collection are jaded, substance-abusing, lost souls, but few are more so than the narrator of each of these linked stories, a Pakistani-American B-movie-grade actor named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
It allows her to dramatize both his shape-shifting and her efforts to pin him down, and its insufficiency is a big part of the pathos in this first collection.
The characters in this first collection of short fiction are as varied as a lonely New England teenager, a Montana outdoorsman and a blind Canadian shell collector living in Kenya, but the tales are linked by two themes: hunting and being hunted, holding on and letting go.
Among the things that fall from above in this first collection of short fiction (much of it preoccupied with loss) are a deadly bucket that crashes through a schoolroom window, rain, turning leaves and a gigantic black spot that eclipses the sun and threatens to destroy an entire town.
His second book, Problems of the Self (= PS; 1973), was a collection of his philosophical papers from 1956 to 1972; his further collections of essays (Moral Luck, 1981, and Making Sense of Humanity, 1998) were as much landmarks in the literature as this first collection.
This third collection, published in London as "Hey Yeah Right Get a Life" -- a title I kind of miss -- finally ought to establish her reputation on these shores.
