Russell Hoban

I have been thinking about this line since dave posted it in my replies two days ago

A large interior off Charing Cross Road with a vast projection on three walls and ceiling of glowing jellyfish swimming in a dark sea. People are standing around watching it.

For the Russell Hoban fans. I was walking down Tottenham Court Road yesterday and thought I saw a woman cradling a baby, but it was just some groceries, the head an iceberg lettuce. Then I saw a massive animation of flailing tentacles - but by the time I got near enough it had changed to jellyfish.

russell hoban seems to be one of those midcentury authors that has argely been forgotten which is a shame because damn this dude could write a beautiful sentence

“Oh what we been, and what we come to!” - Riddley Walker

NNVSNU TSRUNGH ... 🦑

(If the codes are all used by the time you see this, you can still check out the album here: mikedickinson.bandcamp.com/album/the-me...)

98. Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker — Backlisted For this episode Andy & John welcome back two guests. Max Porter is a writer editor and former bookseller. His first book  Grief is the Thing with Feathers (published by Faber ) won...

My reading life is divided into before Riddley and after Riddley. That's how big the impact was and purely a fluke of finding him in a library in Melbourne. I was just thinking about him again so I just searched on Bsky to see what was here. This is a good discussion of the book

A cup of coffee and a very beat-up copy of Turtle Diary

#TurtleDiary by #RussellHoban is going to haunt me. Such an insightful novel. Thanks for the recommendation, @grantmcgaheran.bsky.social!
#Booksky 📚

Definitely a mug worth bargaining for!

This book has lived in my brain since I first read it in high school, circa 1981 or so, copying down multiple lines from it into my spiral notebook. And I think I admire it more every time I reread it. A quietly funny and thoughtful observational tour de force.

Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban

I’ve only read Riddley Walker (couple of years ago) but there were a couple of really lovely blogs about Turtle Diary in particular that piqued my interest. If you wrote about this book, thank you so much! 💕

I have a Friends card; I like the way they nod me through when I show it: I'm not a stranger. I always feel good in museums. I like the high ceilings and the acoustics, the footsteps...
The Bat Tattoo - Russell Hoban #quotes #booksky #SA4QE 💙📚 1/2

Remembering Russell Hoban, American ex-pat writer whose works span many genres—fantasy, sci-fi, mainstream fiction, poetry, & #children’books, perhaps best known for Frances the Badger series. #kidlit

Celebrating Russell Hoban's 101st birthday by rereading The Bat Tattoo, which was the 1st of his novels I read, stumbling upon him randomly as I read extracts from various books on his publishers website.

"'You don't look fine,' I said.
'What I mean is, I don't need help.'
I was about to say that everybody needs help but I decided not to. 'OK, I'll leave you to it then."
The Bat Tattoo - Russell Hoban #quotes #booksky #SA4QE 💙📚

A favorite quote from a favorite book by a favorite author on what would have been his 101st birthday.

#SA4QE

Russell Hoban would have been 101 today. Once he walked among us, exactly like a person; now, among tiny dancing giants in the dim red caverns of sleep.
@russellhoban.bsky.social @mcfarland.bsky.social

A quotation on Death from Russell Hoban's 1983 novel 'Pilgermann'.

The author Russell Hoban (4 February 1925 - 13 December 2011) would have turned 101 on 4 February 2026. May he rest in eternal crystalline vibrations of purple-blue. #sa4qe

Russell Hoban - BOTD

I need to read more Russell Hoban

A photo of copies of Riddley Walker, Fremder, Turtle Diary, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin Boaz, Kleinzeit, Pilgermann, The Medusa Frequency and The Mouse and His Child, all by Russell Hoban.

"Riddley Walkers ben to show
Riddley Walkers on the go
Dont go Riddley Walkers track
Drop Johns ryding on his back

Stil I wunt have no other track."

Happy birthday Russell Hoban.

Cover for Riddley Walker. Contains positive blurbs from critics. A MASTERPIECE The Oserver; EXTRAORDINARY...IT WILL BE A CULT BOOK The Listener... etc.

Cover for Pilergrmann. Man on ghostly horse jumps over a tower emanating the horse. There are mountains in the background.

Russell Hoban (1925-2011) was born on this day. Bibliography: www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.c...

L, Hannah Firmin, 1982; R, Rowena Morrill, 1984
#scifi #sciencefiction #books #literature

Best sculptural assemblage we've seen so far this year. Hooray for towers of books! #SA4QE

Cover of the first edition of the novel Fremder by Russell Hoban, with a design of green spirals based on the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction.

Quotation from Chapter 2 of Russell Hoban's novel Fremder, which reads as follows. You know how it is when you’re sitting in a bar somewhere dark and quiet just breathing in and out and maintaining neutral buoyancy and a stranger starts talking to you and after a while he brings out of his pocket a letter coming apart at the creases; he brings out this letter to show you that at one time he mattered more than he does now and he tells you the story of his life. At first you wish he’d go away but perhaps you say to yourself, Maybe one day I’ll want somebody to listen to my story. Never mind. My name is Fremder Gorn. Fremder means stranger in German.

Quotation from Chapter 7 of Russell Hoban's novel Fremder, which reads as follows. Holding on to the world is mostly an act of faith: you see a little bit of it in front of you and you believe in the rest of it both in time and space. If you’re scheduled for a jump to Hubble on Tuesday you believe in you, in Hubble, in the jump, and in Tuesday. Sometimes it was hard for me to believe all of it.

Quotation from Chapter 5 of Russell Hoban's novel Fremder, which reads as follows. I think about the dead a lot, their wants and their needs and their unfinished business; I suppose it’s because of the way I came into the world. The dead prodigiously outnumber the living, and although their lives have stopped their action hasn’t; they are with us always, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting. As a child I used to think about my mother and about her grandparents who died in Auschwitz. And my unknown father, I mostly thought of him as dead too. The dead are with me in the ordinary moments of every day--sometimes I see my hand lift a cup of coffee or sign my name and I feel ghost hands moving with mine, lifting their no-coffee, signing their no-names. And when I flicker they're always with me. Other deep spacers have told me they never dream in flicker--how can M-waves dream?--but I know that I do. I always come out of it with a deep sadness, half-remembering blurred faces. Each of us is the forward point of a procession stretching back into the darkness. And even within oneself, every moment is a self that dies: the road to each day's midnight is littered with corpses and all of them whispering. As I write this I'm listening to Beethoven's F Major Quartet, Opus 59, No. 1, the first Razumovsky, while thousands of my dead selves hum along with it, sometimes weeping for times that are gone.

In honor of Russell Hoban’s 101st birthday, I’m currently rereading his eerie and poetic 1996 science fiction novel Fremder, so I thought I’d share a few favorite quotes from that. #SA4QE @russellhoban.bsky.social

A sheet of yellow paper, held down by two turtle paperweights, with a quotation from Russell Hoban's 1975 novel Turtle Diary, which reads as follows. How do the turtles find Ascension Island? There are sharks in the water too. Some of the turtles get eaten by sharks. Do the turtles know about sharks? How do they not think about the sharks when they're swimming that 1,400 miles? Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn't think about sharks unless a shark is there. Sea turtles can't shut themselves up in their shells as land turtles do. Their shells are like tight bone vests and their flippers are always sticking out. Nothing they can do if a shark comes along. Pray. Ridiculous to think of a turtle praying with all those teeth coming up from below. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. Then it doesn't seem so hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind.

A sheet of yellow paper taped up on the wall above a pay phone. It has a quotation by Russell Hoban, which reads as follows. It is a strange and frightening thing to be a human being, to partake of the mystery and madness of human consciousness. Russell Hoban, novelist, 1925-2011. Why yellow paper? Why today? russell hoban dot org has the answers.

A sheet of yellow paper slipped in between books on a library shelf, next to a copy of Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. On the yellow paper it says, We know what fiction is but it isn't all that easy to know what reality is.

Hoban 101! Today would have been the 101st birthday of novelist Russell Hoban. If you’d like to help celebrate by participating in the annual quotation-sharing event known as the SA4QE, share your favorite quotes from Russ’s books using the hashtag #SA4QE and be sure to tag this account!

Suddenly occurred to me it's the 4th. Has anyone done #SA4QE, yes they have.

'Door' by Russell Hoban. "Wel wun tym thay foun a key it hadda noat tyd to it the noat sed THIS IS THE WUN."

Happy 101st Birthday to the late Russell Hoban (4 February 1925 - 13 December 2011). #sa4qe

@russellhoban.bsky.social

Dory Previn - Mythical Kings and Iguanas YouTube video by Mettz Musik

“I have flown to star-stained heights on bent and battered wings ... ”

Dory Previn performing her song "Mythical Kings and Iguanas," which provides the epigraph to Chapter 3 of Russell Hoban's novel Fremder.

Here’s my answer to the next question: “What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel?”

(Answer: It’s something by @russellhoban.bsky.social.)

www.letterspace.org/2026/01/17/i...

Grateful for the opportunity this year to conduct research in the Russell Hoban Papers at Yale University.
@russellhoban.bsky.social
@mcfarland.bsky.social

Andy Bown interviewed on his musical collaboration with Russell Hoban ‘Out There’ russellhoban.org is delighted to publish an exclusive interview with Status Quo’s Andy Bown on his newly-released musical collaboration with Russell Hoban, Out There. Prompted by the Hoban100…

Status Quo ivory-tickler Andy Bown talks to the Russell Hoban website about their musical collaboration "Out There" - exclusive interview! russellhoban.org/2025/12/05/a...