Critical reception

Like most minimalists, he tends to eschew the term. Donald Barthelme called The Illustrator “a remarkable achievement,” and “a brilliant piece of work. It is funny and sinister and affecting and profound, all at the same time."^[12] Anthony Burgess said, "His ear is astounding, as is his narrative power, his ability to deal shocks and psychological truths, and his sheer grasp of the form."^[13] John Hawkes wrote "his stories are among the funniest, profoundest, and most exactingly written of any appearing in print."^[14] Of Rumor and Other Stories, Frederick Barthelme said "The world through James Robison's eyes is such a dazzling show of delicacy and precision that heartbreak turns on the choice of a verb. His dialogue is never less than perfect. Radiant, energetic, and above all, touching."^[15]

Recent work

Since 2010, Robison has again begun to publish extensively, with work appearing in The Manchester Review,^[16] Smokelong Quarterly,^[17] The Blue Fifth Review,^[18] Commonline,^[19] BLIP Magazine,^[20] Blast Furnace,^[21] Scythe Literary Journal,^[22] Metazen,^[23] The Raleigh Review,^[24] Whale Sound,^[25] and Corium Magazine.^[26] Normally reticent, he granted an interview to Smokelong Quarterly,^[27] in which he discussed aesthetics: "I saw a Nova-like show about dark matter, how scientists know that it exists because some light waves firing to earth bend and curve all around a precisely shaped nothingness. I thought, boy howdy, this is how so much art, plastic or literary, from the 20th and 21st Century behaves: Its true content is what it refuses to describe explicitly, but the shape of its meaning may be precisely limned by implication." Contributing to a piece posted in BLIP, he wrote:^[28] "For years, decades, I tried to teach the students to do lightning strike stuff. Bang. Blinding light. Whiff of burnt earth. Then go away and do not worry about anything because you have not done the great damage of boring anybody. It was years of this. NOW many are doing it and NOW, 25, 30 years later, it's good that they are and I am happy to see such stuff and even that its name is FLASH fiction."

He is an active member of the Fictionaut site, of which he said:^[29] "Fictionaut is a test track and display room for works in process and as a writer, your readers there make up a community of trusted and truthful equals, eerily reliable so far. Writing into a void is miserable, like telling jokes to a wall. Fictionaut provides a round-the-clock, faithfully attentive audience. It's a post post graduate-level workshop." In an interview with Meg Pokrass at Fictionaut Five,^[30] he said: "A story must have three ingredients, like, oral surgery, Puccini’s Turandot, and divorce. Or hurricane science, a niece, and physics. If I have three large thoughts, intuitions or detections about three varied things, I’ll launch a story." Later in the interview, he said, "Before you can be a writer you must make it new and the only way to do that is to run a harrowing, fearless, ruthless self audit. A psychological, emotional, moral inventory. You must know who you are, without delusions or self-deception, and what you find is apt to scare the spit out of you. But that is the truth you must accept and the truth from which you will construct every sentence."

Novels

• Robison, James (1988). The illustrator. New York: Summit Books. ISBN 9780671527242.

Short fiction

Poetry

Interviews

• "James Robison" Interview by Robert Stewart and Rebekah Presson. New Letters on the Air, 18 Sept. 1987
• "Interview: James Robison" Interview by Patricia Lear. Other Voices 12 (Summer/Fall 1990)
• "Smoking With James Robison" Interview by Lauren Becker. SmokeLong Quarterly, 29 Sept. 2010^[60]
• "Fictionaut Five: James Robison", Interview by Meg Pokrass. Fictionaut Blog - A Literary Community for Adventurous Readers & Writers, 17 Nov. 2010^[61]

Articles, essays and other work