Product Description

Known for his meaty seriocomic novels, Tom Robbins’s shorter work has appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper’s, from Playboy to the New York Times. Collected here for the first time in paperback, the essays, articles, observations—and even some untypical country-music lyrics—offer a rare overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original.

Whether rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso’s Guernica, lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls “the genius waitress,” Tom Robbins’s briefer writings exhibit the five traits that 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 irrepressible love of language. Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are brand-new short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an offbeat assessment of our divided nation. Wherever you open Wild Ducks Flying Backward, you’ll encounter the serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described “romantic Zen hedonist” and “stray dog in the banquet halls of culture.”

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #152621 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-29
• Released on: 2006-08-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Still Life with Woodpecker has regularly published shorter pieces in Esquire, Playboy, the New York Times and elsewhere. The whimsical, quixotic nature of that work comes through in this hit-and-miss affair—one that remains woefully short on fiction, focusing mostly on the author's travel writing, essays, celebrity profiles and poetry. The best travel piece, "The Day the Earth Spit Wart Hogs," finds Robbins traversing a big game park in Tanzania. His commentary on the '60s, the legacy of burger mogul Ray Kroc and the prose of Thomas Pynchon remains trenchant and provocative; other pieces are dated to the point of irrelevance (his foreword to Terrance McKenna's 1992 The Archaic Revival). As a poet, Robbins is obvious and heavy-handed, but occasionally he hits the kind of mystical note that characterizes "Catch 28" and makes his florid imagery work. The fiction is brief and mostly forgettable. But an essay called "In Defiance of Gravity" starts as a riff on an obscure club and winds up being an ode to the combination of unconventionality and humor that define Robbins's career as a writer.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
Robbins calls himself a "romantic Zen hedonist" and a "stray dog in the banquet halls of culture." If only this audio presentation of his short stories, essays, and poems were as interesting as his self-proclaimed titles. Aside from a one-dimensional introduction read by Debra Winger, Robbins reads every word. His delivery is dull, his pace excruciatingly slow, and his presentation lacking in vocal dynamics. He even starts each piece by saying, "This next one is entitled . . . ." One can only imagine how the delivery of his eccentric observations might have been improved by a professional narrator. This effort is disappointing. M.R.E. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Robbins' belief in the power of "defiant humor," exuberant love of language, and playful Zen perspective are key elements in his zestfully comic and cosmic novels, including his most recent, Villa Incognito (2003). It is, therefore, a great pleasure to find this psychedelic son of Mark Twain, this metaphor-slinging, myth-steeped champion of liberation directly addressing his aesthetic and spiritual concerns in this retrospective collection of essays, poetry, and short stories. Robbins' funny and astute short works shimmer with original and piquant descriptions, sensual delight, and a firm grasp of human nature and history. He displays his critical chops in an incandescent review of a 1967 Doors concert, and a richly argued recent essay in praise of "crazy wisdom." He marvels at nature in a vivid account of a journey to the Okavango Delta in Botswana, offers resonant tributes to Joseph Campbell and Terence Mc-Kenna, and states his writer's credo: "We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain"--a mission he fulfills with verve. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Odds-n-Sods From Tom Robbins
As a loyal Tom Robbins fan, I have read almost all of his published works. Like many of you, I have even met him in person at a book signing or two... So when I spotted this little gem, I thought it was going to a collection of short stories. I had read his novels- or at least most of them and figured a collection of short stories by Tom Robbins would be interesting to say the least. What I didn't really pick up on was that the front cover read "The Short Writings of Tom Robbins" not "The Short Stories of Tom Robbins".

Had I been more observant, I might not have been surprised by the fact that stories as such are almost non-existent in this book. Instead we are treated to Tom's responses on various subjects, short essays about famous people he admires or has met, critiques, opinions etc.

At times the Tom Robbins we all know shines through at other times, he is about as missing as the short stories I had hoped to find. This collection is kind of like a retrospective. Misc. stuff he had jotted down over the years for magazines and newspapers and so on. It spans several years of his writing career- so not all of the content is as well written as his later works. But according to his author's note, he tried to reword some of the pieces prior to this publication.

Overall it is enjoyable to read and the more recently written pieces- the ones that actually seem like Tom Robbins wrote them may even make it all worth while. Still, this collection is only for the diehards. It isn't a good place to start for a new reader. To anyone looking to test the waters... try Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume or Skinny Legs and All.

Robbins & Ducks
Tom Robbins has been a favorite writer of mine since the 70's. However, I was only aware of his fiction. In Wild Ducks, I found a whole new genre of his writings and musings. Some essays, some reports, some simply not available for a pigeon hole but all highly entertaining. If you have been a long term fan of Tom Robbins, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

i'm torn
tom robbins is a talented artist to say the least.

his wild, loose gift for language is knees and ankles above most, truly a vonnegut or southern for the mtv generation.

his style is bold an unmistakable, were you to give nearly any selection from this book to a reader at least familiar with robbins's they would surely be able to deduce the author based on his frantic off-the-cuff style and wildly imaginative metaphors.

in this artist retrospective the reader is presented with a wild smattering of material from this prolific wordsmith, and while robbins's claim to literary fame is due primarily to his novels, equally erotic and existential, the contents of "wild ducks..." is mostly of the non-fiction variety.

reviews, tributes, and travel writing populate the majority of pages in this volume but some short fiction is included for those who like to keep everything un-real.

the only problem i have with this collection, the flaw that kept it from grabbing that big five-star-brass-ring -the dung beatle in the ointment- is the poetry and lyrics section. the vast majority of poetry is trying at best, dreary and cloying at worst and robbins, though a modern literary marvel, is no exception to this rule. his poetry is bad bordering on worse and his attempts at writing country music lyrics are, well at least i hope, stabs at satirizing that dreadful playground of would be cowboys/girls. save for three amusing haiku and few [shell] silverstein-esque children's poems this section was as dreadful as i imagine dickens re-writing whitman would be.

so, thank you, mr. robbins, for collecting a career's worth of excellent prose into a single volume for those of us that missed it the first time around, and while i'm sure there's still a mess of shorts still fit to print next time leave out the poetry.