Fiction. The forty-four stories of DREAMS OF A ROBOT DANCING BEE will come as a welcome surprise to readers familiar with Tate's previous work. Like Chekhov and Bruno Schulz, Tate seems both awed and bemused by small town life, with its legends, flights of fancy, heightened emotions, tragedies and small ruptures in the fabric of ordinary existence. Tate's narrators are gleeful, peripatetic, dry, mundane, clueless, witty, and self-pitying; in their slightly odd, yet totally recognizable American idiom, they reveal a skewed, yet all the more familiar middle America.
"Fiction lovers who come to this book with an open mind will find themselves challenged and entertained by a brilliant writer with a very fertile imagination."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Author Hometown: AMHERST, MA USA
About the author: James Vincent Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1943. His collection of short fiction, DREAMS OF A ROBOT DANCING BEE was published by Verse Press (now Wave Books) in 2002. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Ghost Soldiers (Ecco, 2008); Return to the City of White Donkeys (Ecco, 2004); Memoir of the Hawk (Ecco, 2001); Shroud of the Gnome (Ecco, 1997); and Worshipful Company of Fletchers (Ecco, 1994), which won the National Book Award. His Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1991) won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award. His honors include a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and is currently a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.
Reviews:
author @ PennSound
Publishers Weekly starred review
Melissa Maerz @ Rain Taxi
Josh Cook @ Bookslut
Timothy Hodler @ Details
Marilyn Dahl @ Shelf Awareness
