The Russell Hoban website

Welcome to russellhoban.org, providing definitive information and news about the late novelist Russell Hoban and his work.

Russell Hoban would have been 99 this year. Since 2002, fans around the world have celebrated his birthday on 4th February by sharing their favourite quotations from his books in public places and online. Find out more. Photo: a famous line from Riddley Walker, posted in White Rock BC, 2019 by Ra McGuire.


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Summary: Hoban's second novel for adults, Kleinzeit is a story detailing the eponymous title character's brush with illness and creativity. When Kleinzeit is fired from his job as an advertising copywriter, he ends up in hospital with a "skewed hypotenuse", being tended by the healthy and...
Russell Hoban's final short story was written specially for the Exhibition Road Show, a festival held in London in July-August 2012. The story appears in Road Stories, a collection by various writers inspired by London's Exhibition Road, home to many of the city's great museums including the...
The Second Mrs Kong is an opera by Sir Harrison Birtwistle with libretto by Russell Hoban. From Wikipedia: "Glyndebourne Touring Opera first staged the opera on 24 October 1994.The cast included Philip Langridge, Helen Field and Michael Chance. Tom Cairns designed and directed the production, in...
From the Bloomsbury blurb: When Irving Goodman falls in love with Justine Trimble he is close to the end of his life and she's been dead for forty-seven years. Irving doesn't know how he's going to attain his heart's desire but he knows a man who does. Justine was a star of 1950s black-and-white...
Summary:Fourth Galaxy, 4 November 2052: in the black sparkle of deep space a figure in a blue overall tumbles over and over as it drifts towards the planet Badr-al-Budur. No space suit, no helmet, no oxygen. He can't be alive, can he? But he is. First Navigator Fremder Gorn is the only survivor...
I have little religious knowledge but then, as the disembodied protagonist of this book says, “Theologians and fathers of the Church cannot confound me, they have no firmer ground on which to stand than I.” I know more about “quantum-jumping to the strange brilliance of total Now” because this book...
No one realizes that the poor marzipan pig has fallen behind the sofa. No one hears his lonely cries for help. His sweetness grows bitter over the months that go by until a mouse discovers him and gobbles him up. But the mouse pays a price for her greed. A desperate feeling of loneliness and...
riddley-indiana.jpg According to reviewers of literature, Hoban’s masterpiece is Riddley Walker.  I agree, but for reasons not noted in any review.  In both conception and presentation, Riddley Walker is a novel unlike any other.  It is a wonder and...
My relationship with Russell Hoban began a little like one of his novels might: in a disordered room in Fulham, piled high with boxes and files. Anyone who has ever seen the inside of Russell's inner sanctum knows that it's like stepping into his mind. Suddenly you're surrounded by all of the...
Summary: A frustrated author hides away in his outpost in Fulham, working nights and trying to forget his lost love, looking for inspiration. Instead his computer puts him in touch with the Kraken, a fantastic squidlike mind in mid-existentialist crisis. A few wires-in-the-brain later, he becomes...

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