Works by
Tom Robbins
(Writer)

Fiction

• Another Roadside Attraction (1971)
  What if the Second Coming didn't quite come off as advertised?  What if "the Corpse" on display in that funky roadside zoo is really who they say it is--what does that portent for the future of western civilization?  And what if a young clairvoyant named Amanda reestablishes the flea circus as popular entertainment and fertility worship as the principal religious form of our high-tech age? Another Roadside Attraction answers those questions and a lot more.  It tells us, for example, what the sixties were truly all about, not by reporting on the psychedelic decade but by recreating it, from the inside out.  In the process, this stunningly original seriocomic thriller eating a literary hotdog and eroding the borders of the mind.

• Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)
  Starring Sissy Hanshaw--flawlessly beautiful,  almost. A small-town girl with big-time dreams and a  quirk to match--hitchhiking her way into your  heart, your hopes, and your sleeping  bags...
  
  Featuring Bonanza Jellybean and the  smooth-riding cowgirls of Rubber Rose Ranch. Chink,  lascivious guru of yams and yang. Julian, Mohawk by  birth; asthmatic esthete and husband by disposition.  Dr. Robbins, preventive psychiatrist and reality  instructor...
  
  Follow Sissy's  amazing odyssey from Virginia to chic Manhattan to the  Dakota Badlands, where FBI agents, cowgirls, and  ecstatic whooping cranes explode in a deliciously  drawn-out climax...
  
  Buy the movie, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993)  DVD  VHS

• Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
  Still Life with Woodpecker is sort of a love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes.  It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders.  It also deals with the problem of redheads.

• Jitterbug Perfume (1984)
  Jitterbug Perfume is an epic. which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn't conclude until nine o'clock tonight [Paris time]. It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle is actually is the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon becaused it is leaking and there is only a drop of two left.

• Skinny Legs and All (1990)
  An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations....
  
  It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which spins this gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative novel, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine--while the illusions that obscure humanity's view of the true universe fall away, one by one, like Salome's veils.
  
  Skinny Legs and All deals with today's most sensitive issues: race, politics, marriage, art, religion, money, and lust.  It weaves lyrically through what some call the "end days" of our planet.  Refusing to avert its gaze from the horrors of the apocalypse, it also refuses to let the alleged end of the world spoil its mood.  And its mood is defiantly upbeat.
  
  In the gloriously inventive Tom Robbins style, here are characters, phrases, stories, and ideas that dance together on the page, wild and sexy, like Salome herself.  Or was it Jezebel?

• Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)
  When the stock market crashes on the Thursday before Easter, you — an ambitious, although ineffectual and not entirely ethical young broker — are convinced you're facing the Weekend from Hell. Before the market reopens on Monday, you're going to have to scramble and scheme to cover your butt, but there's no way you can anticipate the baffling disappearance of a 300-pound psychic, the fall from grace of a born-again monkey, or the intrusion in your life of a tattooed stranger intent on blowing your mind and most of your fuses. Over these fateful three days, you will be forced to confront everything from mysterious African rituals to legendary amphibians, from tarot-card bombshells to street violence, from your own sexuality to outer space. This is, after all, a Tom Robbins novel — and the author has never been in finer form.

• Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)
  Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government; a pacifist who carries a gun; a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy; a cyberwhiz who hates computers; a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior).
  
  Yet there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Switters. He doesn't merely pack a pistol. He is a pistol. And as we dog Switters's strangely elevated heels across four continents, in and out of love and danger, discovering in the process the "true" Third Secret of Fatima, we experience Tom Robbins -- that fearless storyteller, spiritual renegade, and verbal break dancer -- at the top of his game.
  
  On one level this is a fast-paced CIA adventure story with comic overtones; on another it's a serious novel of ideas that brings the Big Picture into unexpected focus; but perhaps more than anything else, Fierce Invalids is a sexy celebration of language and life.

• Villa Incognito (2003)
  Imagine that there are American MIAs who chose to remain missing after the Vietnam War.
  
  Imagine that there is a family in which four generations of strong, alluring women have shared a mysterious connection to an outlandish figure from Japanese folklore.
  
  Imagine just those things (don’t even try to imagine the love story) and you’ll have a foretaste of Tom Robbins’s eighth and perhaps most beautifully crafted novel--a work as timeless as myth yet as topical as the latest international threat.
  
  On one level, this is a book about identity, masquerade and disguise--about “the false mustache of the world”--but neither the mists of Laos nor the smog of Bangkok, neither the overcast of Seattle nor the fog of San Francisco, neither the murk of the intelligence community nor the mummery of the circus can obscure the linguistic phosphor that illuminates the pages of Villa Incognito.

Collections

• Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2005
  Known for his meaty seriocomic novels–expansive works that are simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow–Tom Robbins has also published over the years a number of short pieces, predominantly nonfiction. His travel articles, essays, and tributes to actors, musicians, sex kittens, and thinkers have appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper’s, from Playboy to the New York Times, High Times, and Life. A generous sampling, collected here for the first time and including works as diverse as scholarly art criticism and some decidedly untypical country-
  music lyrics, Wild Ducks Flying Backward offers a rare sweeping overview of the eclectic
  sensibility of an American original.
  
  Whether he is rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso’s Guernica, lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls “the genius waitress,” Robbins’s briefer writings often exhibit the same five traits that perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, a
  mystical but keenly observant eye, and an irrepressible love of language.
  
  Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are a couple of short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an off-beat assessment of our divided nation. And wherever we open Wild Ducks Flying Backward, we’re apt to encounter examples of the intently serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described “romantic Zen hedonist” and “stray dog in the banquet halls of culture

See also:

• Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture That Changed America (1987) by Bruce Vanwyngarden and Peter O. Whitmer
  Includes information on Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Tom Robbins, and William Burroughs