Douglas Woolf was a writer's writer: his tales of serene down-and-outers, belated frontiersmen, and cross-country spiritual seekers were much admired by fellow-artists Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, and Paul Mazursky. "He was so gentle," wrote Creeley shortly after Woolf's death in 1992, "so particular to the ways people live together. It is in his intimate focus, in the unobtrusive detailing of gesture, conversation, place, that his genius is clear." 
 Woolf's quiet genius is on display in each of the twenty-seven short stories in Hypocritic Days, a career-spanning collection edited by his literary executor, Sandra Braman. Take the title story, for instance: it's a kind of improvised, Laurel-and-Hardy dance between a washed-up Saratoga horse jockey and his large, slow, uncommunicative son, both characters stepping lightly, in tandem, as they negotiate the boy's awkward passage from teenager to young man. Or "Bank Day," in which Woolf tenderly depicts an impoverished young couple expecting their first child, full of hopeful, high-minded plans for the future even though they subsist on a diet of cat food and cold coffee. None of his characters ever lose hope, despite the horrors and despairs surrounding them, and not because they are fools but because, in the words of Robert Creeley, "they have the talent, and the pleasure, of making in this world a place of their own."

Hypocritic Days and Other Tales

Literature & Fiction

Woolf, Douglas

United States

Black Sparrow Press

Hypocritic Days & Other Tales

Black Sparrow Pr

Douglas Woolf was a writer's writer: his tales of serene down-and-outers, belated frontiersmen, and cross-country spiritual seekers were much admired by fellow-artists Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, and Paul Mazursky. "He was so gentle," wrote Creeley shortly after Woolf's death in 1992, "so particular to the ways people live together. It is in his intimate focus, in the unobtrusive detailing of gesture, conversation, place, that his genius is clear."Woolf's quiet genius is on display in each of the twenty-seven short stories in Hypocritic Days, a career-spanning collection edited by his literary executor, Sandra Braman. Take the title story, for instance: it's a kind of improvised, Laurel-and-Hardy dance between a washed-up Saratoga horse jockey and his large, slow, uncommunicative son, both characters stepping lightly, in tandem, as they negotiate the boy's awkward passage from teenager to young man. Or "Bank Day," in which Woolf tenderly depicts an impoverished young couple expecting their first child, full of hopeful, high-minded plans for the future even though they subsist on a diet of cat food and cold coffee. None of his characters ever lose hope, despite the horrors and despairs surrounding them, and not because they are fools but because, in the words of Robert Creeley, "they have the talent, and the pleasure, of making in this world a place of their own."

Braman, Sandra

Reprint of 1959 first edition. Biographical sketch of the author, with photograph, follows text. viii , 273, 5 pages. stiff paper wrappers. 8vo..

Fade Out

Reprint of 1959 first edition this being one of 200 hardbound copies. Biographical sketch of the author, with photograph, follows text. viii , 273, 5 pages. quarter cloth, paper-covered boards, paper spine label, acetate dust jacket. 8vo..

Wall to Wall (American Literature)

Like so many of Woolf's odysseys into the heart of America's subcultures, ?"Wall to Wall"?traces a modern?Ulysses?in reverse: from a West Coast asylum where he works as an attendant to a Boston asylum where he visits his mother, Claude Squires views roadside America from its weak side--the tough underbelly of the Southwest, Tucson, the Rio Grande, Nogales, The Border--before thrusting himself into Okie's sacred shrine, Oklahoma City, and into the staid Eastern Corridor that ends in Boston. Claude's vehicle is a '59 Thunderhead, a "female beast," which his father, a used-car dealer in L.A., has commissioned him to deliver to Oklahoma City. And like all of Woolf's cars, the Thunderhead is a "she," a domineering companion in Claude's cross-country picaresque "flight of passage." In "Wall to Wall" Woolf's view is evocative and is very much his own. First published by Grove Press in 1962, "Wall to Wall" has been an underground classic for over thirty-five years, a comic and satiric masterpiece.

Contemporary

Dalkey Archive Press

The Timing Chain

Tombouctou Books

Poetry

Wolf Run Books

Well-respected throughout his career, Douglas Woolf created some of the most startlingly original works of the twentieth century. The two novels collected here create a dreamlike vision of America where helplessness prevails and the actions of the sane seem tinged with madness. Ya! takes place during the Christmas reunion of a penniless novelist and his teenage daughter at the nightmarish home of a super-American family; John-Juan begins with an amnesiac who finds himself in a Mexican border town with only his pajamas and watch before becoming part of a surreal and somewhat frightening community organized around "runners" that collect trash along the highways.

YA! & John-Juan (American Literature)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Woolf, Douglas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Woolf, Douglas

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Woolf, Douglas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Hypocritic Days and Other Tales

Hypocritic Days & Other Tales

Hypocritic Days and Other Tales

Fade Out

Fade Out

Wall to Wall (American Literature)

Wall to Wall (American Literature)

The Timing Chain

Had

YA! & John-Juan (American Literature)