Russell Hoban is a writer whose genius is expressed with equal brilliance in books both for children and for adults. Since the late 1950s, Hoban has created some of the best-known characters in postwa...
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Critical Essay by Penelope Mesic
Russell Hoban has made the unthinkable familiar ground. Riddley Walker concerns itself with a young hero, newly initiated as a soothsayer or "connection man&#x...
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Critical Essay by Victoria Glendinning
[Riddley Walker] is extraordinary. It is not 'like' anything, though John Gardner in Grendel and William Golding in The Inheritors ventured tentat...
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Critical Essay by Marion Glastonbury
[The sub-literate narration in Riddley Walker] is initially painful for us fast readers and good spellers. But the heavy head-work required to decipher it is just...
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Critical Essay by Jennifer Uglow
Riddley Walker, as the name suggests, is a novel which courts obscurity. Perhaps twenty years as a successful children's writer has taught Russell Hoban that o...
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Critical Essay by Penelope Lively
The first thing to be said about Russell Hoban's apocalyptic fable [Riddley Walker] is that it is compulsive reading. From the first words … you are im...
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Critical Essay by Michael Dirda
Many readers on opening Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban's extraordinary combination of quest romance, science fiction, linguistic experiment, and theological spec...
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Critical Essay by Benjamin Demott
Intermittently "Riddley Walker" brings to mind books by several contemporary authors—Anthony Burgess's "The Clockwork Orange,�...
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Critical Essay by A. Alvarez
Since Russell Hoban is an American—now settled in London—who has also written books for children, it seems natural enough that Riddley Walker should pick up...
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Russell (Conwell) Hoban
Critical Essay by Penelope Mesic
