HUMORS OF BLOOD & SKIN: A JOHN HAWKES READER presents Hawkess own selection from his novels, stories, and his current novel-in-progress . . . This READER is both an introduction to Hawkess fiction and a single literary montage, focused on comedy, eroticism, and the imagination . . . JOHN HAWKES, novelist and short story writer. From the beginning, with the publication of surrealistic novella CHARIVARI in 1949, Hawkes has explored the lunar landscapes of the human psyche. As the alternating contrasts of his landscapes suggest, Hawkess richly varied work explores the polarities and limits of the imagination. Though some works convey more recognizable traditional plots and structures than others, the stylistic experiments of all his fictions have enabled Hawkes to forge, over his forty-year career, a mythology of the contemporary imagination caught between the forces of life and death, both imagined and real.