Oblivion: An After Autobiography
June 2022
Gold Wake Press Collective, 2020
When Rock and rollers die, it's often said they go to that "great rock band in the sky." But what about writers? In Robin Hemley's poignant and wildly humorous new book, Oblivion: An After Autobiography, writers go to The Cafe of Minor Authors (the writers who aren;t famous at least). A tale of literary ambition that survives death, Oblivion follows the afterlife of one hapless author searching for a way out of oblivion, who, in the process, encounters old literary friends and enemies, Prague of 1911, the Yiddish theater, Franz Kafka and his close friend, Max Brod, and dybbuks. Like Andrew Sean Greer's Less, but with dead people.
Praise for Oblivion: An After Autobiography
“A mesmerizing meditation on immortality, both the literary and fleshly kinds and its ultimate unattainability… Robin Hemley has written his best (and strangest) book and ginned up a troubled luminous Kafka for our troubled luminous times … like language, like summer, like love, OBLIVION is irresistible.”
Junot Diaz, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
“Oblivion is a deeply intelligent and strikingly honest exploration of what ultimately drives a writer to write, and the cold loneliness of the journey, and how literary success in one’s lifetime is, at best, a fickle proposition. I will tell every writer I know, struggling or successful, to read this book.”
Kaylie Jones, author of Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir
The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology
Bloomsbury, 2021
An all-in-one craft guide and anthology, this is the first creative writing book to find inspiration and guidance in the diverse literary traditions of Asia. Including exemplary stories by leading writers from Japan, China, India, Singapore and beyond as well as those from Asian diasporas in Europe and America, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories offers an exciting take on the traditional how-to writing guide by drawing from a rich new trove of short stories beyond the western canon which readers may never have encountered before. While still taking stock of the traditional elements of story such as character, viewpoint and setting, Xu and Hemley let these compelling stories speak for themselves to offer readers new ideas and approaches which could enrich their own creative work. Structured around the themes encountered in the stories, such as race and identity, history and power, family and aspirations, this text is a vital companion for writers at all levels keen to develop and find new perspectives on key elements of their craft.
Borderline Citizen
University of Nebraska Press, 2020
Rushing to his seat on a plane headed to Hong Kong from Moscow, where he had minutes to spare before his visa expired, Robin Hemley put his U.S. passport on his tray table. This simple act provoked his seatmate, an energetic and disillusioned Ukrainian, to ask: “You patriot?” compelling Hemley to muse on the question for years. A travel writer drawn to obscure and intriguing places (enclaves, exclaves, and overseas territories among them), he journeyed far afield as he sought to understand what it means to belong to a nation, and what it means to go outside the borders of that nation.
I’ll Tell You Mine
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Looking back at 30 years of essays from Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, this anthology is edited by Robin Hemley and Hope Edelman.
Reply All: Stories
Break Away Books, 2012
Robin's third collection of award-winning and widely anthologized short stories takes a humorous, edgy, and frank look at the human art of deception and self-deception.
A Field Guide for Immersion Writing: Memoir, Journalism, and Travel
University of Georgia Press, 2012
Considering various types of participatory writing as different strains of one style—immersion writing—Robin offers new perspectives and practical advice for writers of this nonfiction genre.
DO-OVER!
Little, Brown & Co., 2009
In which a forty-eight-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom, and other embarrassments.
Twirl/Run
powerHouse Books, 2009
Robin provides the text in Twirl/Run, an artist’s book of photographs by Jeff Mermelstein.
Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003
Bison Books, 2007
In 1983, an anthropologist announced that the "anthropological find of the century"—the discovery of a "stone age" tribe in the rain forests of the Philippines—had become the "ethnographic hoax of the century." Or had it?
Extreme Fiction: Fabulists and Formalists
Longman Publishing, 2003
A collection of "non-traditional" stories from renowned as well as less familiar writers of the past 100 years.
Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness
University of Iowa Press, 2013
Graywolf Press, 1998
A recounting of the life of Robin's sister Nola, who died at the age of twenty-five after several years of treatment for schizophrenia.
Turning Life Into Fiction
Story Press, 1994
Graywolf Press, 2006
An in-depth manual, with writing exercises on how to convert real life into good storytelling.
The Big Ear (Stories)
John F. Blair, 1997
A collection of sixteen stories, with a cast of characters ranging from the queen of England to the last man on earth.
The Last Studebaker
Break Away Books, 2012
Graywolf Press, 1992 & 1993
South Bend, Indiana, where the closing of the Studebaker plant years ago has had disastrous consequences for Lois Kulwicki.
All You Can Eat (Stories)
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988
In this collection of thirteen short stories, Hemley's characters strive to live with a decency no longer common. They confess to ignorance, or the wrong kind of knowledge, but while they quietly make mistakes, they also make amends.