Riddley Walker, Expanded Edition - Softcover

Hoban, Russell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253212340 ISBN 13: 9780253212344

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1998

Synopsis

"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.

About this title

About the Author

Russell Hoban (1925-2011) is the author of numerous children’s books, including The Mouse and His Child. Other adult novels include The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Kleinzeit, Turtle Diary, and Pilgermann.

Review

"Riddley Walker deserves its cult status for making us feel spectral in the midst of life: it confronts us with a posterity that looks back at us as blankly as we peer at it."

(Public Books)

"Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker' is that rare novel that can be loved by doomster geeks and literary readers alike. It's narrated in a language burnt to its rudiments by nuclear holocaust and revived into new forms by survivors in England who live as hunters, and who believe in a past that's half history, half myth.Summer 2008"

(Michael Helm Nuvo "Off the Shelf")

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0253212340
• ISBN 13: 9780253212344
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256