Critical Essay by Sally Beauman
[There] is a feeling of frustration about [the stories in "Last One Home Sleeps in the Yellow Bed"], as if the writer felt his chosen keyboard were too s...
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Critical Essay by Tom Marshall
[Fat Woman] is an enjoyable and absorbing read, and … has as a central aim an exploration of the dignity and even complexity of the lives of quite ordinary or so...
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Critical Essay by Jerry Wasserman
Leon Rooke's Cry Evil is mostly unremitting in its sense of life as nasty and brutish. His stories are stocked with characters who, if they aren't mad ...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Scobie
[One] feature of Rooke's fiction has been the way the ordinary lives of ordinary people coexist with the most extravagant and bizarre events and are presented ...
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Critical Essay by Barbara Wade
To give us such a clear understanding of the lives of the poor and the disaffected, western writer Leon Rooke must have spent a lifetime soaking up their mannerisms, th...
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Critical Essay by Cathleen Hoskins
[In Fat Woman] Rooke gave us a strong dose of the macabre mixed with rollicking humor. Now, in his excellent collection of stories, Death Suite, he has upped the an...
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Critical Essay by Timothy Dow Adams
In light of the number and variety of his previous publications, it is surprising how amateurish the beginning of Rooke's first novel [Fat Woman] is. Many o...
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Critical Essay by Choice
[Death Suite] shows Rooke in full command of his unique talents. His imagination moves agilely between the surreal and superreal, the kinky supernatural and the logically ine...
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Critical Essay by Choice
[Rooke's The Last One Home Sleeps in the Yellow Bed shows] that the author knows his craft: the careful pacing, the ability to capture and render a scene, and his fine...
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Critical Essay by Kenneth Baker
The most convincing stories in Leon Rooke's uneven collection ["The Broad Back of the Angel"] are those with a first person narrator. In "W...
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Critical Essay by John Mills
[Leon Rooke] writes excellent and sometimes poetic prose—which is enough to disqualify him from popular acclaim; he is an experimentalist—which is enough to...
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Critical Essay by George Garrett
[Last One Home Sleeps in the Yellow Bed] was a powerful, energetic, and original collection. Rooke has come (or gone) a ways since then, and The Broad Back of the Ang...
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Critical Essay by Michael Taylor
I did not find [the stories in The Love Parlour] as disturbing as they were probably intended to be; partly because their avantgardism … keeps them at a remove...
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Critical Essay by Lesley Hogan
[The Love Parlour, published in Canada, and The Broad Back of the Angel, published in the United States,] show masterful control of a variety of techniques. Rooke...
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Critical Essay by Russell M. Brown
Despite Rooke's versatility, there is something about all his fiction that remains identifiable, characteristic, and uniquely personal. Made out of internali...
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Critical Essay by David Quammen
"Fat Woman" is a slim novel with a big heart and a sizable funnybone. Leon Rooke puts us inside the copious body of Ella Mae Hopkins … and we wadd...
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Critical Essay by Sally Beauman
