James Robison has published many stories in The New Yorker. He won a Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his first novel, The Illustrator (1988). His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Grand Street and thrice in The Manchester Review. The Mississippi Review devoted an issue to seven of his short stories. He co-wrote the 2008 film, New Orleans Mon Amour, and has poetry and prose is forthcoming or published in Story Quarterly, The Northwest Review, The Green Mountains Review, The Dublin Quarterly, Salt Hill Journal, The Montreal Review, Scythe, Pirene’s Fountain, The Raleigh Review, Smokelong Quarterly, The Santa Clara Review, elimae, The Blue Fifth Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Wigleaf, Commonline, BLIP Magazine, The Ramshackle Review, Blast Furnace, Stepaway Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, The Houston Literary Review, Metazen, Corium Magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review, Message In A Bottle, Thrush Poetry Journal, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Necessary Fiction, Danse Macabre, THIS magazine, The Paradise Review, Drunken Boat, The Philadelphia Review of Books, The 2River View, The View From Here Literary Magazine, The Free State Review, NNN Virgogray Press and, from India and Macedonia, The Enchanting Verses Literary Review and elsewhere. His work has been translated into Modern Greek by Antonia-bulika Kubareli and published by Kedros Publishers – Ekdoseis Kedros – in Athens, Greece. He taught for eight years as an Associate Visiting Professor at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, was Visiting Writer at Loyola College of Maryland, was Fiction Editor of The North Dakota Quarterly and an Associate Professor at the University of North Dakota for five years and was 2011 Visiting Artist at The University of Southern Mississippi. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for 2012 and his story appears in that anthology’s 2013 edition.
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Rumor and Other StoriesFrom"Transfer"
My mother supports an agency that every week or so sends her a list of the world’s political prisoners who are known to be in immediate danger of their lives. She sits over a chunky Adler typewriter and composes polite pleas to jailors and torturers and killers on behalf of their victims. “In the name of liberty, of decency, Your Excellency…”
These petitions for pity and reason, strangled as they are by formality, necessarily without anger, she types on personal stationery of pale yellow or pale tangerine or aqua—the kind got at a pharmacy. Her bursitis makes the typing difficult, and the text is unevenly imprinted, since some of the keys have more bite than others, the way she works them. All the same, her handwriting is impossible.
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Rumor and Other StoriesFrom"The Foundry"
Sissy and I had, the year before when we still enjoyed the good graces of both our sets of partners, gone to Bermuda. Sissy was out on the beach one afternoon, asleep in a vinyl lounger, the kind with a walloping big tricolored umbrella attached. As she slept, the tide moved on her. I was watching from back in, where I had taken my towel. The sea wash was gulping at the pebbles around Sissy’s chair legs, and then at the chair legs themselves, and then the waters lifted up her nylon duffel and tipped it. Sissy was asleep, and I waded out and rescued her duffel, but I let her stay in the cold tide. I went back in-beach and watched her sleeping until she was like a person on a raft. Still she didn’t move, didn’t wake up. There was the raft and then the big straw circle of her sun hat and then the big circle made by the umbrella. “How Sissy looked, setting sail for the horizon,” I said to them.
Rumor and Other Stories: -
Rumor and Other StoriesFrom"Rumor"
One Sunday, they got particularly drunk, and Enoch put a cigarette burn in the cushion of Billy’s silk-covered divan. “Look, do you think that matters?” Billy said to Enoch, who was being contrite. “I’m happy to see signs of life in this place, even if they’re only your cigarette scars.” To show how little concerned he was about the ornaments in his home, Billy dropped and broke a piece of pottery, a crackle-glazed jug that his dead wife had brought from Mexico.
Rumor and Other Stories:
“Mr. Robison is never superior or petty, nor does he give in to easy pessimism and despair. His characters are compassionate, witty, perplexed, courteous; his epiphanies are whispered. And he is as persuasive in the persona of a foundryman as he is in that of a high school girl . . . This is a book of great feeling and imagination, with engagingly eccentric dialogue and all the right gestures. You can open it to any page and know you're in good hands. James Robison has the gift.” —The New York Times [on Rumor and Other Stories]
“Robison deals, for the most part, with people whose forms of distress are habitual rather than critical. They are not looking for sympathy—which may be why they are sympathetic characters. And if the stakes aren't always high, there is still the assured quality of the narrative, fresh and winning dialogue, and unexpected endings that amplify all that came before.” —Amy Hempel, Los Angeles Times [on Rumor and Other Stories]
“Robison's precise command of language, his wickedly acute ear and mocking voice, mark him as a writer of talent.” —Publishers Weekly [on The Illustrator]
