Robert Cochran, professor of English at the University of Arkansas, serves as editor of the University of Arkansas Press's Arkansas Character series. He is the author of Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life and A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice. Haunted Man's Report is his first work of literary criticism since Samuel Beckett: A Study of the Short Fiction (1991).

"What are we Portis fans to do, after re-reading the Little Rock laureate's five novels to pieces? Cochran's smart, engaging critical biography makes a terrific companion volume to Escape Velocity. Even grizzled Portisheads will find fresh glimmers of insight."
--Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams

"Cochran's volume gathers a great deal of scrupulous research, and even some portion of psycho-biographical speculation, into a persuasive close reading of five novels, plus journalism, a short story, and Portis's single stage play. Cochran brings to light both the sidelong historical ruminations and the sorrowful depths of feeling that admirers have always sensed moving beneath the picaresque plots and the insouciant breezes of Portis's prose."
--Jonathan Lethem, The New York Review of Books, June 2024

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

Pub date: 2024-04-09

Length: 272 pages