Wow! eBook
The Devil's Fingers & Other Personal Essays
Author(s): James Hoggard (Author)
- Publisher: Wings Press
- Publication Date: 1 Oct. 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 192 pages
- ISBN-10: 1609402901
- ISBN-13: 9781609402907
Book Description
The more than two dozen personal essays in this new collection by one of Texas’s master storytellers range from travel pieces about Havana and London to stories about small-town exotics that are funny, nervy, outlandish, and all characterized by James Hoggard’s sly wit and his noted openness to people he meets along the way. Fast-paced, yet at the same time reflective, Hoggard guides his readers into some of the wonderfully strange turns of the world, including a Saturday morning gathering of khaki-dressed men who have hunkered down at a Dairy Queen to get away from their women who want them to spend the day doing chores. At the same time they see Hoggard as a bicycle-riding exotic who finds it normal to go out and bike 60-odd miles before lunch. Now and then the encounters are hair-raising, sometimes scary, but Hoggard always provides the kind of interior monologues that draw upon both deep reading and deep observation.
Editorial Reviews
Review
. . . . the book’s highlights blend motion, reflection, action, history, thought, and drive in surprising ways that will make readers reconsider how to move through this changing world.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Throughout the collection, Hoggard emphasizes the tangible, personal, often physical nature of experience over abstractions and metaphor. I come away from his brilliant writing reminded of the Combatant in the work of Kazantzakis, the individual or collective human who pits himself against the world, striving ever upward, leaving a red ribbon behind: a trail of bloody footprints for us to follow toward some transubstantiation of flesh into spirit.
The Devil’s Fingers is a life-affirming work.” ―David Bowles, The MonitorAbout the Author
James Hoggard is an author, a translator, and a poet whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Arts & Letters, Harvard Review, and Words Without Borders. He is the recipient of the Lon Tinkle Award and the former president of the Texas Institute of Letters. He is the Perkins-Prothro Distinguished Professor of English at Midwestern State University and the author of numerous books, including The Mayor’s Daughter, Triangles of Light: The Edward Hopper Poems, and Wearing the River. He lives in Wichita Falls, Texas.
