Hob Broun’s first book, Odditorium could ostensibly be called a “novel,” although it digressively destabilises “character,” “story,” and almost all other hallmarks of the form. A seedy, pulpy pinball game of botched drug deals and bungling gunplay, the book’s pleasure lies in its unpredictability...
"A beat Philip Marlowe, a dazed Sam Spade, whose drink is spiked with MTV" - New York Times
Cardinal Numbers is a posthumous collection of brilliantly enigmatic short fiction by Hob Broun, written with the aid of a respirator when the author was paralyzed from the neck down. Witty and full of minimalist surprise, these stories flirt with fragment, fabulism, and collage. In “Rosella, in ...
The air crackled with ozone. Brick smokestacks of a knitting mill loomed over the bleachers along the third-base line and behind corrugated tin fencing in the outfield (279 feet to straightaway center). Burdock and pokeweed grew between the ties of an abandoned rail spur. All quiet as the two tea...
Didn’t I have more stamina when I was young? Wasn’t it easier keeping the balls in the air? I head out for the Boyers place to say how’s business, hoping something or other will chime. They’re in the garage, packing up orders—boot knives, freeze-dried stroganoff, like that. The slogan is stencile...
He tried to stamp out the coal and lurched. How could the road be so muddy and still bounce him? Conlan was no scientist, that he’d grant. Breath plumed out of his mouth, made a milky blue patch on the windshield. His tongue was dry. It wanted to taste raspberry. “Mutual trust,” Mr. Tunbridge sai...