Product Description

"“An accomplished artist and writer, in addition to being an entertaining and often an electrifying one. John Woods does something very original in his combining of the arts in this collection, and my hat’s off to him in his two-hat achievement.” — Stephen Dixon “John Dermot Woods’ Complete Collection thrills the daylights out of me. Every word, every image is infused with vitality. Every place, person and thing breathes and moves. It is an android’s heaven, a manikin’s cocktail party. It reminds me of the Golden Age cartoons where human departure imbues clocks, canned goods, books, statues, toys or brooms with sentience. When we close our eyes our kitchens Jitterbug, our teddy bears waltz. The thing I love most about this world is that while Woods’ imagination is opened full throttle, he provides an almost ethnographical structure to explicate it. His wonderland is so thoroughly startling because of -- not in spite of -- his ability to make his account as reliable as a Fodor’s travel guide.” — Reginald McKnight “John Woods’ The Complete Collection brings the small-town America of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio into conversation with Italo Calvino's fake travelogue, Invisible Cities, and that book's dreamish vision of Imperial China. Like Calvino's novel, the book evokes a kind of nearly Renaissance-like iconographic worldview of Memory and the Imagination, but one channeled through the disposable world of American children's toys and comic books. The flat voice is disconcertingly balanced between farce, comedy and deadly seriousness.” — Johannes Göransson "

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #627947 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Customer Reviews

Fantastic, magical stories.
This book is basically a look into the lives of a small community, but Woods presents that look through fun-house style glasses. It's experimental and magical while being undeniably familiar. The book goes to the wackiest imaginable places without ever letting go of this anchor of recognizable truth.
Anyway, i thought it was great. And there are super-kick pictures throughout.

Haunting, funny, lovely
Creepy and beautiful. Surprising moments of incredible tenderness, shot through with humor, just as it should be. Woods's visual artwork enhances his written work by complicating it; in some cases nearly upending it. I love the effect of the illustrations on the stories, and vice versa. In some ways, this is a collection of ghost stories, but the ghosts are painfully human. An uncommonly good, unsettling book--and also a great display piece.