A great story casts a spell. It can enthrall you so completely that you not only forget that you're stuck between two manspreaders in a noisy, crowded, smelly subway car but miss your stop.
This is one of those rare books that meet Kafka's ideal of what a book should be: An ax for the frozen sea within us. It also meets Nabokov's concise definition of art: Beauty plus pity.
If a book is a work of prose and the prose is bad, the book is bad. Anyone can come up with a great idea for a book, but you don't make books out of ideas, you make them out of language.
Only the what really matters, and that's the beauty of it: A great story casts a spell. It can enthrall you so completely that you not only forget that you're stuck between two manspreaders in a noisy, crowded, smelly subway car but miss your stop.
The poetry of James Tate has had many admirers, but few people seem to know his brilliant, endlessly inventive story collection, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee.
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