Hypocritic Days & Other Tales

Douglas Woolf was a writer's writer: his tales of serene down-and-outers, belated frontiersmen, and cross-country spiritual seekers were much admired by fellow-artists Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, and Paul Mazursky. "He was so gentle," wrote Creeley shortly after Woolf's death in 1992, "so particular to the ways people live together. It is in his intimate focus, in the unobtrusive detailing of gesture, conversation, place, that his genius is clear."Woolf's quiet genius is on display in each of the twenty-seven short stories in Hypocritic Days, a career-spanning collection edited by his literary executor, Sandra Braman. Take the title story, for instance: it's a kind of improvised, Laurel-and-Hardy dance between a washed-up Saratoga horse jockey and his large, slow, uncommunicative son, both characters stepping lightly, in tandem, as they negotiate the boy's awkward passage from teenager to young man. Or "Bank Day," in which Woolf tenderly depicts an impoverished young couple expecting their first child, full of hopeful, high-minded plans for the future even though they subsist on a diet of cat food and cold coffee. None of his characters ever lose hope, despite the horrors and despairs surrounding them, and not because they are fools but because, in the words of Robert Creeley, "they have the talent, and the pleasure, of making in this world a place of their own."Woolf, Douglas is the author of 'Hypocritic Days & Other Tales' with ISBN 9780876859117 and ISBN 0876859112.