Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

The Last Gas Station & Other Stories

3/5 ( ratings)

Tom Clark's collection of short fiction, The Last Gas Station, is in two contrasting parts. It opens with 23 very short prose pieces amusingly surreal California vignettes, some no longer than a page, peopled by denim-clad cowgirls, itinerant lover boys, Martin Heidegger, Boris Pasternak, Muslim college students, Vietnam vets, Ty Cobb, Ted Berrigan, and a great dinosaur poet of the Jurassic period. These are followed by the novella "Incident at Basecamp," an odd matter-of-fact account of a close encounter between a young married couple and a spindly, three-toed, mind-reading extraterrestrial somewhere deep in the Rocky Mountain wilderness.

"Clark is versatile," wrote the Los Angeles Times; he's "a poet turned sportswriter turned novelist" whose range is brilliantly showcased by this substantial collection. The opening sketches are playful and delightful, but "in the tradition of 'biggest is best,' The Last Gas Station closes with a wallop: 'Incident at Basecamp' [is] a sturdy science-fiction novelette."

Pages: 151

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Black Sparrow Press

Release: June 01, 1980

ISBN: 0876854560

ISBN 13: 9780876854563

The Last Gas Station & Other Stories

3/5 ( ratings)

Tom Clark's collection of short fiction, The Last Gas Station, is in two contrasting parts. It opens with 23 very short prose pieces amusingly surreal California vignettes, some no longer than a page, peopled by denim-clad cowgirls, itinerant lover boys, Martin Heidegger, Boris Pasternak, Muslim college students, Vietnam vets, Ty Cobb, Ted Berrigan, and a great dinosaur poet of the Jurassic period. These are followed by the novella "Incident at Basecamp," an odd matter-of-fact account of a close encounter between a young married couple and a spindly, three-toed, mind-reading extraterrestrial somewhere deep in the Rocky Mountain wilderness.

"Clark is versatile," wrote the Los Angeles Times; he's "a poet turned sportswriter turned novelist" whose range is brilliantly showcased by this substantial collection. The opening sketches are playful and delightful, but "in the tradition of 'biggest is best,' The Last Gas Station closes with a wallop: 'Incident at Basecamp' [is] a sturdy science-fiction novelette."

Pages: 151

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Black Sparrow Press

Release: June 01, 1980

ISBN: 0876854560

ISBN 13: 9780876854563

More books from Tom Clark

Jack Kerouac: A Biography

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Light and Shade: New and Selected Poems

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Late Returns: A Memoir of Ted Berrigan

4.4/5 ( ratings)

Rock Hudson: Friend of Mine

3.3/5 ( ratings)

Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Champagne and Baloney: The Rise and Fall of Finley's A's

4.1/5 ( ratings)

The Great Naropa Poetry Wars

3.8/5 ( ratings)

Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Core Clinical Cases in Psychiatry: A Problem-Solving Approach

3.8/5 ( ratings)

No Fresh Cut Flowers: An Afterlife Anthology

4.8/5 ( ratings)

Think Again: The Best Essays from Prospect 1995-2020

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump

3.3/5 ( ratings)

How To Sleep Faster (Summer 2013) Issue 4

The Age of Obama: The Changing Place of Minorities in British and American Society

Psikanalizin Cazibesi

The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation: Non-Indigenous People and the Responsibility to Engage

Judicial Decision-Making: A Coursebook

GAS #5

Live

Rate this book!

Write a review?