James Robison (author)
Encyclopedia
James Robison is an American novelist, short story writer, poet and screenwriter. The author of The Illustrator (1988) and Rumor and Other Stories (1985), his work has frequently appeared in The New Yorker
and numerous other journals. He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award
for his short fiction and a Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has held teaching posts at numerous universities across the United States, including the University of Houston
and Loyola University Maryland.
, in 1946. His father was a graphic artist and freelance illustrator in Columbus, Ohio. Robison attended Worthington High School from 1960-1964. He attended Ohio State University. After working for several years as a commercial artist, he continued his education, and received an MFA from Brown University
in 1979, where he worked with Robert Coover
, R.V. Cassill, and John Hawkes. His creative thesis was entitled Gold Whiskey and Other Stories. After Brown, he traveled to Baltimore and Boston. In 1986, he began teaching at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program
, where he would spend much of the next decade. Since leaving Houston, he has taught at various universities. He was Visiting Artist at the University of Southern Mississippi in the Spring of 2011 and is presently at Florida Gulf Coast University
.
, The Mississippi Review, Best American Short Stories
1980 (selected by Stanley Elkin), and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. The Mississippi Review devoted an entire issue to his work in 1994.
His stories were first collected in Rumor and Other Stories in 1985. His first novel, The Illustrator, appeared in 1988. He has at least one screenplay to his credit, 2008's New Orleans, Mon Amour. Since 2010, his work has undergone something of a renaissance, with numerous new stories, flash fictions, and poems appearing in journals such as Blip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Blue Fifth Review, and elsewhere.
called The Illustrator “a remarkable achievement,” and “a brilliant piece of work. It is funny and sinister and affecting and profound, all at the same time." Anthony Burgess
said, "His ear is astounding, as is his narrative power, his ability to deal shocks and psychological truths, and his sheer grasp of the form." John Hawkes wrote "his stories are among the funniest, profoundest, and most exactingly written of any appearing in print." Of Rumor and Other Stories, Frederick Barthelme
said "The world through James Robison's eyes is such a dazzling show of delicacy and precision that heartbreak turns on the choice of a verb. His dialogue is never less than perfect. Radiant, energetic, and above all, touching."
He is an active member of the Fictionaut site, of which he said: "Fictionaut is a test track and display room for works in process and as a writer, your readers there make up a community of trusted and truthful equals, eerily reliable so far. Writing into a void is miserable, like telling jokes to a wall. Fictionaut provides a round-the-clock, faithfully attentive audience. It's a post post graduate-level workshop." In an interview with Meg Pokrass at Fictionaut Five, he said: "A story must have three ingredients, like, oral surgery, Puccini’s Turandot, and divorce. Or hurricane science, a niece, and physics. If I have three large thoughts, intuitions or detections about three varied things, I’ll launch a story." Later in the interview, he said, "Before you can be a writer you must make it new and the only way to do that is to run a harrowing, fearless, ruthless self audit. A psychological, emotional, moral inventory. You must know who you are, without delusions or self-deception, and what you find is apt to scare the spit out of you. But that is the truth you must accept and the truth from which you will construct every sentence."
Short Story Collections
Journals
Anthologies
Articles, essays and other work
Screenplay
Audio
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
and numerous other journals. He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award
Whiting Writers' Award
The Whiting Writers' Award is an American award presented annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays. The award is sponsored by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and has been presented since 1985. As of 2007, winners receive US $50,000.-External links:**...
for his short fiction and a Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has held teaching posts at numerous universities across the United States, including the University of Houston
University of Houston
The University of Houston is a state research university, and is the flagship institution of the University of Houston System. Founded in 1927, it is Texas's third-largest university with nearly 40,000 students. Its campus spans 667 acres in southeast Houston, and was known as University of...
and Loyola University Maryland.
Biography
Robison was born in Worthington, OhioWorthington, Ohio
-Dissolution of the Company:By August 11, 1804 the plat maps were completed, payments or notes promising payments collected and deeds prepared for all sixteen thousand acres of the Scioto Company's purchase...
, in 1946. His father was a graphic artist and freelance illustrator in Columbus, Ohio. Robison attended Worthington High School from 1960-1964. He attended Ohio State University. After working for several years as a commercial artist, he continued his education, and received an MFA from Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
in 1979, where he worked with Robert Coover
Robert Coover
Robert Lowell Coover is an American author and professor in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction.-Life and works:...
, R.V. Cassill, and John Hawkes. His creative thesis was entitled Gold Whiskey and Other Stories. After Brown, he traveled to Baltimore and Boston. In 1986, he began teaching at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program
University of Houston Creative Writing Program
The University of Houston Creative Writing program is a graduate fiction and poetry program located in Houston, Texas. It was rated second in the nation by U.S. News & World Report in its first annual ranking of writing programs in 1997. It rated 26th in the nation in Poets & Writers and its PhD...
, where he would spend much of the next decade. Since leaving Houston, he has taught at various universities. He was Visiting Artist at the University of Southern Mississippi in the Spring of 2011 and is presently at Florida Gulf Coast University
Florida Gulf Coast University
Florida Gulf Coast University, also known as FGCU, is a coeducational public university located just south of the Southwest Florida International Airport in the South Fort Myers region of unincorporated Lee County, Florida, United States. The university belongs to the 11-campus State University...
.
Publications
Robison's first publications were in literary journals, including eight stories in The New Yorker beginning in 1979, as well as Grand StreetGrand Street
Grand Street was an American magazine which appeared from 1981 to 2004. It was described by the New York Times as "one of the most revered literary magazines of the postwar era."-Founding:...
, The Mississippi Review, Best American Short Stories
Best American Short Stories
The Best American Short Stories yearly anthology is a part of The Best American Series published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Since 1915, the BASS anthology has striven to contain the best short stories by some of the best-known writers in contemporary American literature.-Edward O'Brien:The...
1980 (selected by Stanley Elkin), and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. The Mississippi Review devoted an entire issue to his work in 1994.
His stories were first collected in Rumor and Other Stories in 1985. His first novel, The Illustrator, appeared in 1988. He has at least one screenplay to his credit, 2008's New Orleans, Mon Amour. Since 2010, his work has undergone something of a renaissance, with numerous new stories, flash fictions, and poems appearing in journals such as Blip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Blue Fifth Review, and elsewhere.
Critical reception
Like most minimalists, he tends to eschew the term. Donald BarthelmeDonald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston , co-founder of Fiction Donald...
called The Illustrator “a remarkable achievement,” and “a brilliant piece of work. It is funny and sinister and affecting and profound, all at the same time." Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
said, "His ear is astounding, as is his narrative power, his ability to deal shocks and psychological truths, and his sheer grasp of the form." John Hawkes wrote "his stories are among the funniest, profoundest, and most exactingly written of any appearing in print." Of Rumor and Other Stories, Frederick Barthelme
Frederick Barthelme
Fredrick Barthelme is an American novelist and short story author, well known as one of the seminal writers of minimalist fiction...
said "The world through James Robison's eyes is such a dazzling show of delicacy and precision that heartbreak turns on the choice of a verb. His dialogue is never less than perfect. Radiant, energetic, and above all, touching."
Recent work
Since 2010, Robison has again begun to publish extensively, with work appearing in The Manchester Review, Smokelong Quarterly, The Blue Fifth Review, Commonline, BLIP Magazine, Blast Furnace, The Houston Literary Review, Scythe Literary Journal, Metazen, The Raleigh Review, Whale Sound, and Corium Magazine. Normally reticent, he granted an interview to Smokelong Quarterly, in which he discussed aesthetics: "I saw a Nova-like show about dark matter, how scientists know that it exists because some light waves firing to earth bend and curve all around a precisely shaped nothingness. I thought, boy howdy, this is how so much art, plastic or literary, from the 20th and 21st Century behaves: Its true content is what it refuses to describe explicitly, but the shape of its meaning may be precisely limned by implication." Contributing to a piece posted in BLIP, he wrote: "For years, decades, I tried to teach the students to do lightning strike stuff. Bang. Blinding light. Whiff of burnt earth. Then go away and do not worry about anything because you have not done the great damage of boring anybody. It was years of this. NOW many are doing it and NOW, 25, 30 years later, it's good that they are and I am happy to see such stuff and even that its name is FLASH fiction."He is an active member of the Fictionaut site, of which he said: "Fictionaut is a test track and display room for works in process and as a writer, your readers there make up a community of trusted and truthful equals, eerily reliable so far. Writing into a void is miserable, like telling jokes to a wall. Fictionaut provides a round-the-clock, faithfully attentive audience. It's a post post graduate-level workshop." In an interview with Meg Pokrass at Fictionaut Five, he said: "A story must have three ingredients, like, oral surgery, Puccini’s Turandot, and divorce. Or hurricane science, a niece, and physics. If I have three large thoughts, intuitions or detections about three varied things, I’ll launch a story." Later in the interview, he said, "Before you can be a writer you must make it new and the only way to do that is to run a harrowing, fearless, ruthless self audit. A psychological, emotional, moral inventory. You must know who you are, without delusions or self-deception, and what you find is apt to scare the spit out of you. But that is the truth you must accept and the truth from which you will construct every sentence."
Works
Novel- The Illustrator (1988) ISBN 9780671527242
Short Story Collections
- Gold Whiskey and Other Stories [Brown University] (1979) OCLCOCLCOCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. is "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs"...
5350221 - Rumor and Other Stories (1985) ISBN 9780671527228
- 7 Stories: James Robison, Mississippi Review 22.3 (1994)
Journals
- Short Stories
- "The Ecstasy of the Animals" Mississippi Review 8.1&2 (Winter/Spring 1979): 30-34
- "Home" The New Yorker 24 Dec. 1979: 32
- "Rumor" The New Yorker 12 Jan. 1981: 35
- "The Line" The New Yorker 30 Aug. 1982: 32
- "Set Off" The New Yorker 27 Sept. 1982: 42
- "Transfer" The New Yorker 31 Jan. 1983: 44
- "The Indian Gardens" The New Yorker 3 Sept. 1984: 30
- "The Foundry" Grand Street 4.1 (Autumn 1984): 7-15
- "Between Seasons" The New Yorker 14 June 1993: 76
- "Square One" The New Yorker 16 Aug. 1993: 82
- "The Late Style" MississippiReview.com 1.9 (Dec 1995)
- "Rodeo Days" Raleigh Review 1 (2010) ISBN 9780615402512
- "The Early Style" Corium Magazine 2 (June 2010)
- "Guard" SmokeLong Quarterly 29 (Sept 2010)
- "Be Bop" Blip Magazine (Fall 2010)
- "Radio Talkers" The Manchester Review 5 (Oct 2010)
- "Prologue" elimae (Nov 2010)
- "Mars" Blip Magazine 9 Nov. 2010
- "Prodigal Heart" Ramshackle Review 2 (Dec 2010)
- "I See Men Like Trees, Walking" Wigleaf: (very) Short Fiction 9 Feb. 2011
- "DETOX" Wilderness House Literary Review 22, 6.2 (July 2011)
- "Fall" Corium Magazine 6 (July 2011)
- "Great Lakes Foundry 1990" The Montréal Review (July 2011)
- "Why Poets Are No Good in Movies Nowadays and Four Poets and Which to Film" The Dublin Quarterly 16 (Sept 2011)
- "LVIV" StepAway Magazine 3 (Sept 2011)
- Poetry
- "The Slender Scent" Commonline 10 June 2010
- "Kindness" Scythe Literary Journal III (Summer 2010)
- "Poem: 'For the Film New Orleans Mon Amour' & Comment" Blue Fifth Review Broadside Series #19 X.v (July 2010)
- "The Struggle Leaving" The Houston Literary Review (Sept 2010): 27
- "Gray Gaze" Metazen 9 Sept. 2010
- "The Failure of Claws" Blue Fifth Review III (Fall 2010)
- "History Is The Work Of The Dead" Blast Furnace 1.1 (Winter 2010)
- "Weightless" Scythe Literary Journal IV (Winter 2010)
- "Late August" Istanbul Literary Review 19 (Jan 2011)
- "The Mystic in a Rage of Verse" The St. Sebastian Review 1.2 (Fall 2011): 13
- "Burning Tide," "Lemon Shark" Northwest Review 49.1 (2011): 77
- "Hector" Pirene's Fountain 4.10 (Oct 2011)
- Interviews
- "James Robison" Interview by Robert Stewart and Rebekah Presson. New Letters on the Air 18 Sept. 1987
- "Interview: James Robison" Interview by Patricia Lear. Other Voices 12 (Summer/Fall 1990)
- "Smoking With James Robison" Interview by Lauren Becker. SmokeLong Quarterly 29 Sept. 2010
- "Fictionaut Five: James Robison" Interview by Meg Pokrass. Fictionaut Blog - A Literary Community for Adventurous Readers & Writers 17 Nov. 2010
Anthologies
- "The Late Style" The Pushcart Prize XX: Best of the Small Presses (1996) ISBN 9780916366995
- "Home" The Best American Short Stories, 1980 : Selected from U.S. and Canadian Magazines. Ed. Stanley ElkinStanley ElkinStanley Lawrence Elkin was a Jewish American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships.-Biography:...
(1980) ISBN 9780395294468
Articles, essays and other work
- "Notes for a Story" Hit and Run Magazine 22 Mar. 2009
- "Some Grateful Thoughts About Fictionaut" Fictionaut Blog - A Literary Community for Adventurous Readers & Writers 23 Apr. 2009
- "Wallace Stevens Week: James Robison on Stevens" BIG OTHER 17 Nov. 2010
- "What May Have Been: Review of Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G by Susan Tepper and Gary Percesepe" Used Furniture Review 14 Jan. 2011
- "Why I Write" The Montréal Review (Sept 2011)
Screenplay
- New Orleans, Mon Amour (2008)
Audio
- "James Robison: 'Envy'" Reading and Interview with Robert Stewart and Rebekah Presson. New Letters on the Air 18 Sept. 1987
- "The Slender Scent" Group Reading at Whale Sound 17 Dec. 2010
Comments at Voice Alpha
Awards and honors
- 1980 Best American Short StoriesBest American Short StoriesThe Best American Short Stories yearly anthology is a part of The Best American Series published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Since 1915, the BASS anthology has striven to contain the best short stories by some of the best-known writers in contemporary American literature.-Edward O'Brien:The...
- 1989 Rosenthal Foundation Award in Fiction - American Academy of Arts and Letters
- 1995 Whiting Writers' AwardWhiting Writers' AwardThe Whiting Writers' Award is an American award presented annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays. The award is sponsored by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and has been presented since 1985. As of 2007, winners receive US $50,000.-External links:**...
- 1996 Pushcart PrizePushcart PrizeThe Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize by Pushcart Press that honors the best "poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot" published in the small presses over the previous year. Magazine and small book press editors are invited to nominate up to 6 works they have featured....
External links
- James Robison Bibliography at EasyBib
- James Robison in WorldCatWorldCatWorldCat is a union catalog which itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories which participate in the Online Computer Library Center global cooperative...
- James Robison in JSTORJSTORJSTOR is an online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides its member institutions full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society...
- James Robison short stories in The New YorkerThe New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
- Rosenthal Award Recipients - American Academy of Arts and Letters
- Whiting Writer's Award Recipients