The Complete Collection of People, Places & Things

Fiction. John Woods' THE COMPLETE COLLECTION brings the small-town America of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio into conversation with Italo Calvino's fake travelogue, Invisible Cities, and that book's dreamish vision of Imperial China. Like Calvino's novel, the book evokes a kind of nearly Renaissance-like iconographic worldview of Memory and the Imagination, but one channeled through the disposable world of American children's toys and comic books. The flat voice is disconcertingly balanced between farce, comedy and deadly seriousness--Johannes Goransson. An accomplished artist and writer, in addition to being an entertaining and often an electrifying one. John Woods does something very original in his combining of the arts in this collection, and my hat's off to him in his two-hat achievement--Stephen Dixon.