Questo autore approfondisce le complessità della letteratura americana del XX secolo, con opere che spesso esplorano temi di identità, storia e condizione umana. La sua abilità stilistica risplende attraverso una prosa ricca e strutture narrative complesse. Spinto da un fascino per la scoperta di narrazioni e personaggi non convenzionali, attinge frequentemente a elementi storici e folkloristici per creare storie che sono sia letterariamente sofisticate che profondamente risonanti.
The stories of Dead Dog Lying shine a hard light on society's misfits: the misshapen in mind and body, children mystified by the adult world, and grownups trying--but never quite managing--to get it right. A man receives a message from a cell phone swallowed by a fish he's caught. A boy grows antlers that give him athletic prowess. A fiction writer learns about reality by walking into an improv play. Long after these allegorical stories are ingested, they will haunt the reader's troubled sleep.
Anthony Hecht, a critical study, uses a variety of approaches in detailed analyses of the major poems of the 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winner in poetry. The book traces influence, illuminates individual poems via historical and biographical information, and identifies motifs such as «man's painful doubleness» and «extravagance» which define the world Hecht lives in. The poems are viewed as emblematic of the poet's struggle for equilibrium on the plank between the rocks of determinism and the swamp of mysticism.