Tom Robbins Wants to Pop Your Piñata

Tom Robbins – author of Tibetan Peach Pie, newly released in paperback – writes:

“Like most humans, literate and otherwise, I’m a sucker for a good story, but the storytellers who really carbonate my plasma are the stylists who, like Shakespeare, recognize that the words themselves can be as thrilling or transportive as any narrative they might recount. These days it’s sometimes difficult to find a book by Richard Brautigan, let alone Anaïs Nin and Blaise Cendrars, but here are some other piñata-poppers that prove when it comes to literature, language is not just the frosting, it’s the cake.”

The God of Small Things
By Arundhati Roy

“Friends have complained that there’s a lot of verbal exhibitionism in Roy’s tragicomic portrait of a fated family in modern India, but I maintain it’s perfectly acceptable to show off if you can back it up  —  and Roy backs it up in spades.”

One Hundred Years of Solitude
By Gabriel García Márquez

“By now, just about everybody and her stunt double has read this truly magical evocation of a fictionalized Latin American republic, but it’s worth revisiting on a regular basis, if only for the disarming matter-of-factness of its hallucinogenic imagery.”

Creativity
By Philippe Petit

“One needn’t be an aspiring author or artist (or high-wire walker) to be blown away by this dazzling display of page-bound daredeviltry. Definitely written without a net, I’d think Petit’s explication of the creative process insane if I didn’t know it was also entirely accurate”.

The Bloody Chamber
By Angela Carter

“Carter’s poetically charged, chilling, yet often funny overhaul of traditional fairytales would surely make the Brothers Grimm grimace, Freud fidget, Poe palpitate, and Walt Disney spin in his sepulcher. It’s a weird world after all.”

Flight Behavior
By Barbara Kingsolver
“A wild species is threatened by technology, a passionate housewife is repressed by redneck mores, yet readers manage to emerge refreshed. Only writing as vivid and perfectly pitched as Kingsolver’s could make an ecologically themed novel float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”