One of My Favorite Modern Novelists

Skinny Legs and All - Tom Robbins
Originally published in hardcover in 1990 - Bantam

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This book will always have a place in my heart because it is the first Robbins book I read. I remember the actual independent bookstore I bought it at on vacation (though that was almost 20 years ago as of this writing). I've read everything since and know of very few authors who can turn a phrase like Robbins. To say the very least, everything he writes is a true feast in word usage and storytelling.


Amazon description - An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations…
    It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it’s the axis around which spins Tom Robbins’s gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative new novel, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine—while the illusions that obscure humanity’s view of the true universe fall away, one by one, like Salome’s veils.
     Skinny Legs and All deals, in Robbins’s audacious manner, with today’s most sensitive issues: race, politics, marriage, art, religion, money, and lust. It weaves lyrically through what some call the “end days of our planet. Refusing to avert its gaze from the horrors of the apocalypse, it also refuses to let the alleged end of the world spoil its mood. And its mood is defiantly upbeat.
     In the gloriously inventive Tom Robbins style, here are characters, phrases, stories, and ideas that dance together on the page, wild and sexy, like Salome herself.
     Or was it Jezebel?