Robin Hemley
Author of Turning Life into Fiction
About the Author
Robin Hemley is director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa
Works by Robin Hemley
Associated Works
Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present (2007) — Contributor — 189 copies
Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (2012) — Contributor — 67 copies
Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family (2013) — Contributor — 19 copies
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Common Knowledge
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Relationships
- Hemley, Cecil (father)
Gottlieb, Elaine (mother) - Short biography
- Robin Hemley comes from a literary family. His father, Cecil Hemley, was the founder of the Noonday Press and was the longtime editor and translator of nobel Laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as a poet and novelist. His mother, Elaine Gottlieb Hemley, was a short story writer and also a Singer translator. When Robin was five, his family moved from New York City to Athens, Ohio where his father was the first director of the Ohio University Press. After the death of Robin’s father, Robin’s mother moved the family to Pennsylvania, Missouri, and finally, to South Bend, Indiana where she was a professor of creative writing at Indiana university-South Bend. Robin attended St. Andrews School in Sewanee, TN in high school and also Momoyama Gakuin in Osaka (as detailed in Do-Over!), and later attended Indiana University where he majored in East Asian Languages and Cultures and Anthropology, before finally settling on Comparative Literature. After college, he went to The Iowa Writers Workshop where he graduated in Fiction Writing. He then lived for five months in a farm house in Cuddebackville, New York with the writers David Shields and Kate Sontag – where he was supposed to be writing but mostly just worried about the future. He moved to Chicago in the early 80’s, landing his first job as an editorial assistant at Playboy Magazine, where he worked for a year and a half before receiving an Illinois Arts Council grant that allowed him to quit his full-time job and work as a freelancer and adjunct professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After blowing an interview to be the Assistant Fiction Editor at Esquire, he was accepted as a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he completed his first book of short stories, ALL YOU CAN EAT, which was accepted first by the famous/infamous editor Gordon Lish at Knopf (and then rejected by the same editor a week later) before it found a good home at Atlantic Monthly Press.
Among his academic appointments, he has taught at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Western Washington University, St. Lawrence University, The University of Utah, and The University of Iowa, where he has served as Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program. He has four daughters from two marriages and he has a running motor that keeps him inperpetual motion. Some days he can’t figure out how he sat still long enough to write eight books.
Among his favorite books as a child, he loved reading Greek myths, the Oz series, the Narnia books, Sci-Fi and “speculative fiction, comic books, Kafka, Borges, Isaac Babel, Ray Bradbury, Ursula Leguin, and the wonderful Richard Hughes classic, A High Wind in Jamaica. His tastes have broadened only slightly since then – he deeply regrets selling his comic book collection when he was nineteen and so can’t bring himself to pick up a comic book, but he does read the occasional graphic novel, such as Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home.
Visit his website at www.robinhemley.com
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Statistics
- Works
- 18
- Also by
- 6
- Members
- 583
- Popularity
- #43,005
- Rating
- 3.4
- Reviews
- 27
- ISBNs
- 39
- Languages
- 1
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- 1
Coincidences! As I started to read this novel, my husband was watching a rerun of "Northern Exposure" in which Joel, the main character plays Kafka visiting Cicely and is inspired to write the "The Metamorphosis". I took this as a hopeful sign.
The writing is very enjoyable, but, this is truly a niche read. Many minor characters and details are distractions from the story. The protagonist laments his past, including friends whose stories he coopted and then also meets in Oblivion. I would recommend this for authors, friends or family of authors, or Kafka devotees. As I am neither, it became tedious to read.
Here are a few interesting quotes from Oblivion:
"In a different time, a different country, Kafka might have been the greatest stand-up comedian ever." p. 19
( I agree...I do laugh out loud each time I read the opening line of "The Metamorphosis". I guess many people wonder where that inspiration came from!)
"Success in any form provides little escape when you're being torn to pieces from the inside and simultaneously trying to convey the tremendous worlds you have inside yourself." p. 24
"In the 19th century, nostalgia used to be a medical diagnosis. The Swiss were especially prone to it and people were even said to die from nostalgia." p. 35
"For some of us no matter how many chances at calm, if not peace, we're given, we always somehow choose the maelstrom."
Many other books on my TBR are calling to me. Life is too short for tedious books. DNF at around 56%.… (more)