"[...] unabashed termite art."

"Robert Sheckley wrote tightly crafted, whacked-out social satire in the form of science-fiction stories, using the conceit of future worlds to provide an alienating vantage point on the present. His heyday was the 1950s, when he emerged as a young writer in the pages of thumb-staining pulp mags like Galaxy, Astounding, and Infinity. Sheckley was part of a generation that disassembled the square-jawed tropes of 1920s space operas to produce a new, proto-postmodernist mode of literature, hidden within a genre that many readers at the time dismissed as kiddie lit. Unlike the more mainstream-friendly sentimentalism of Ray Bradbury, or the soberly cosmological world building of Isaac Asimov, Sheckley’s work is unabashed termite art. He illuminates standard sci-fi’s cutout characters and quasi-magical contraptions with a hallucinatory, Technicolor vibrancy, spinning yarns more fabulist than plausible, banged out as permutations of his own pet obsessions, among them mind control, extraterrestrial psychology, and the cruelties of love. [...]

     Though Sheckley continued to write almost up until his death in 2005, Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich’s new collection, Store of the Worlds, leans heavily on the author’s work from the 1950s, including just four tales written in the 1960s, and one in the 1970s. In keeping with the implicit goal of other NYRB science-fiction reissues, they want to rescue Sheckley from the genre ghetto, but at the same time make clear that his talent could only have been forged within that particular crucible."
— Ed Halter, BookForum
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Block/Flow/Flood

"Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase, while others, hunched over a notepad or keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing? In The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (Houghton Mifflin, January), neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the hows and whys of writing, revealing the science behind hypergraphia — the overwhelming urge to write — and its dreaded opposite, writer's block. The result is an innovative contribution to our understanding of creative drive, one that throws new light on the work of some of our greatest writers."

— Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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"Isaac Asimov, who wrote nearly 500 books, is a classic example. He would sit down and compose 90 words a minute on his typewriter and reportedly never suffered a blocked moment. Everyone thinks of Proust as hypergraphic because he wrote such a long novel over such an extended time. Other writers often described as hypergraphic include Stephen King, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, Agatha Christie, Anthony Trollope, John Updike, Herman Melville, and Joyce Carol Oates. [...]
     Certain brain conditions can trigger it [hypergraphia], and they all seem to involve the temporal lobes. It was Norman Geschwind [’51] and colleagues who first showed an association between temporal lobe epilepsy and hypergraphia. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s temporal lobe epilepsy almost certainly caused his prolific writing. Just before his seizures, he would enter a state of religious ecstasy in which his world was flooded with meaning. Between seizures, he wrote hypergraphically, often about his struggle with the fact that the periods in which he seemed to experience the highest truths were also the product of a disease."
— Alice Flaherty, in conversation with Paula Byron (Harvard Medical Alumni Journal)
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