The Russell Hoban website

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

In 2013 novelist Paul MM Cooper landed the task of sorting through and archiving the manuscripts left by Russell Hoban after his death in 2011. Here he gives his account of the process. "I have never been inside a room that so achingly missed its owner," he writes. The manuscripts were later bought by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Connecticut. Cooper's new novel All Our Broken Idols is out now. (Photo: Paul MM Cooper)


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‘This is it ... this is my destiny woman,' Max blurted out when he first met Lola at the Coliseum shop. Not only was she aristocratic and wild at heart, but the two discovered an uncanny convergence of musical tastes. Soon they were converging at every level - Lola filling Max's emptiness and vice...
Along with four Hoban novels, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Turtle Diary, Pilgermann and Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer, the Omnibus contains Return of Manny Rat, the incomplete, fragmentary sequel to The Mouse and His Child, which Hoban began but abandoned and which had never before been...
Captain Najork has never quite got over the time that Tom beat him and his Hired Sportsmen at womble, muck and sneedball, so when he sees Tom hurtle past his window in a two-seater jam-powered frog, he sets off in hot pursuit. The adventures that follow at a nearby girls' boarding school, involving...
Harry hears the rag-and-bone man calling "Rainy numbers up! Any thunder up?" and goes through the rain door to a fantastical world where the weather is made to find an old iron tank used by the rag-and-bone man as a cloud catcher. To scare off the lion that is frightening the man's horse, Lightning...
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...
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...
the kraken.jpg Between September 2002 and March 2005, Russell Hoban contributed to his own discussion forum, The Kraken. In the first of a 2-part feature, Richard Cooper looks back over a selection of his posts. "The Kraken" Yahoo Group was established as a Russell...
The Mouse and His Child is the story of two clockwork mice, a father and son. When the key in the father's back is wound, he dances in a circle, swinging his son up and down. They begin their existence in the warmth of a toy shop at Christmastime, surrounded by fellow windup toys; all the mouse...
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...
When Father comes home at the end of a sorely trying day, he finds all the family fighting and scolding after a sequence of events for which no one is willing to take the blame.   (The New York Review Children's Collection edition)  

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