This author delves into the intricacies of twentieth-century American literature, with works often exploring themes of identity, history, and the human condition. His stylistic dexterity shines through in rich prose and complex narrative structures. Driven by a fascination for uncovering unconventional narratives and characters, he frequently draws upon historical and folkloric elements to craft stories that are both literarily sophisticated and deeply resonant.
The stories of Dead Dog Lying shine a hard light on society's misfits: the misshapen in mind and body, children mystified by the adult world, and grownups trying--but never quite managing--to get it right. A man receives a message from a cell phone swallowed by a fish he's caught. A boy grows antlers that give him athletic prowess. A fiction writer learns about reality by walking into an improv play. Long after these allegorical stories are ingested, they will haunt the reader's troubled sleep.
Anthony Hecht, a critical study, uses a variety of approaches in detailed analyses of the major poems of the 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winner in poetry. The book traces influence, illuminates individual poems via historical and biographical information, and identifies motifs such as «man's painful doubleness» and «extravagance» which define the world Hecht lives in. The poems are viewed as emblematic of the poet's struggle for equilibrium on the plank between the rocks of determinism and the swamp of mysticism.