Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee

By James Tate Description Reviews Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning poet James Tate’s only collection of short fiction.The forty-four stories of Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee will come as a welcome surprise to readers familiar with Tate’s previous work. Like Chekhov and Bruno Schultz, Tate seems both awed and bemused by small town life, with its legends, flights of fancy, heightened emotions, tragedies and small ruptures in the fabric of ordinary existence. Tate’s narrators are gleeful, peripatetic, dry, mundane, clueless, witty, and self-pitying; in their slightly odd, yet totally recognizable American idiom, they reveal a skewed, yet all the more familiar middle America. Tate brings a poet’s touch to the short stories in this astounding and bizarre collection, which reflects the writer’s flair for black humor and absurdity as he explores the nooks and crannies of ordinary life. Tate is a blunt, sharp narrator who takes his stories in unexpected directions, an