 | Riddley Walker, Expanded Edition "A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy. . . . Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and--this matters most--intensely ponderable." --Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review "This is what literature is meant to be." --Anthony Burgess "Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style. . . . The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." --Anthony Thwaite, Observer "Extraordinary . . . Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." --Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World "Stunning, delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid." --John Leonard, The New York Times "Highly enjoyable . . . An intriguing plot . . . Ferociously inventive." --Walter Clemons, Newsweek "Astounding . . . Hoban's soaring flight of imagination is that golden rarity, a dazzlingly realized work of genius." --Jane Clapperton, Cosmopolitan "An imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction.' --Paul Gray, Time Riddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state--and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture--rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author. Russell Hoban was born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania on February 4, 1925. He attended art school in Philadelphia and during World War II, he served in the Army and earned a Bronze Star. He taught art in New York and Connecticut, and also worked as an advertising copywriter and a freelance illustrator before beginning his career as a writer. He began publishing children's books in the late 1950s, including What Does It Do and How Does It Work?, Bedtime for Frances and the six other books featuring Frances, The Story of Hester Mouse Who Became a Writer, What Happened When Jack and Daisy Tried to Fool the Tooth Fairies, and The Mouse and His Child, which was adapted as an animated film in 1977. In 1973, he published his first adult novel, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz. His other books for adults include Turtle Diary, Pilgermann, and Ridley Walker. He received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award for Ridley Walker. He died on December 13 at the age of 86. In 2015 he made the Kate Greenaway Medal shortlist for his title Jim's Lion wth illlustrator Alexis Deacon. (Bowker Author Biography) |
