James Robison Selected Works

Ash, a commercial illustrator living in the seamiest parts of Latin America, the Caribbean and the USA, is the central character in this novel of obsession and the manners and morals of modern urban life. His bizarre relationship with Q, a 17-year old, takes him around the world on a series of darkly satirical adventures. The Illustrator, Robison's first novel, exposes the intensity and formlessness of modern America and its people.

A portfolio of wonderfully observed scenes of modern life, these thirteen stories, set everywhere from the salt marshes of New Hampshire to the California coast, reveal a striking emotional landscape. An unfaithful husband talks, with no one to listen; a house sitter doubts the pretty shape of her own shadow; a widowed lawyer becomes an unwitting participant in her tenants' family crises. Each character is bound up in a sense of duty, and savors detachment—until an inevitable collision with other lives somehow redeems them.