Russell Edson

The Falling Sickness, Russell Edson’s first collection of short plays, will be welcomed by the extensive and devoted readership he has gathered over the years. His turn to the theater reveals a new dimension in his work, a vein of dramatic satire that makes all the more vivid the nightmarish absurdities which underscore so much in our lives. As in his earlier books of illustrated fables, parables, and prose poems, the scale of events is small, though the decibel level is shatteringly high: in each of the four plays, the bewildering wail of a nuclear family giving vent to its pain.…

In her introduction to this remarkable book if fables and drawings, Denise Levertov describes Russel Edson as “one of those originals who appear out of the lonesomeness of a vast, throned country to create a peculiar and defined world . . . a world seen as through the wrong end of a spyglass, miniscule but singularly clear.” “Fable” is really too narrow a term for Russel Edsons’s writing. His brief, tightly-packed, highly-charged paragraphs are the crystallized essence of what could be long stories, and they are prose poems.…