SOURCE: "'Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter'," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 256, No. 22, June 7, 1993, pp. 804-06.

In the following review of Bats out of Hell, Wiggins comments on the major themes of Hannah's fiction and his insights into the male psyche.

Who is he?

A railroad track toward hell?

  —Anne Sexton, "Despair"

In the story "Rat-Faced Auntie," one of the twenty-three new Barry Hannah tales in Bats Out of Hell, someone gives a character named Edgar "books by Kerouac, Bukowski, Brautigan, Hemingway and Burroughs; also the poetry of Anne Sexton." Edgar is a horn player in a motley band and he was "coming on strongly to the bassplaying woman, Snooky, and barely knew that he was capturing her with his new vocabulary stolen from Ms. Sexton."

Now, this points to a widely known but little discussed bonus in reading authors of a different stripe than your own. Hannah himself...