Russell Hoban: Faithful to the Strange

Spanning more than half a century, Russell Hoban's celebrated literary career won him critical accolades and legions of admirers across multiple genres. Many know him from the groundbreaking masterpiece Riddley Walker, with its twelve-year-old protagonist contemplating "what the idear of us myt be" from amidst the ruins of civilization. Some know Hoban from the genre-defying The Mouse and His Child, or from idiosyncratic novels of floundering Londoners struggling with writer's block or whether to steal turtles from the Zoo, hallucinating Death as a chimpanzee, or a grapefruit as the head of Orpheus. Still others fondly recall Frances the Badger's refusal to go to bed, or share Emmet Otter with their own children at Christmas.

This book, the first consideration of Russell Hoban's literary career as a whole, explores what binds these seemingly disparate works together. Discovering unexpected patterns between books written from out of what one character describes as a perpetual "state of surprise," this critical study also draws on Hoban's biography, from his formation as an artist under the influence of jazz in New York to the upheaval of his self-reinvention as a writer, as it offers its own reflection on what the idea of Russell Hoban might be.