Whiting Award James Robison (born October 11, 1946) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet and screenwriter.

The author of The Illustrator (1988) and Rumor and Other Stories (1985), his work has frequently appeared in The New Yorker and numerous other journals.

[11] Since 2010, his work has undergone something of a renaissance, with numerous new stories, flash fictions, and poems appearing in journals such as BLIP Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Blue Fifth Review, and elsewhere.

"[12] Anthony Burgess said, "His ear is astounding, as is his narrative power, his ability to deal shocks and psychological truths, and his sheer grasp of the form.

"[13] John Hawkes wrote "his stories are among the funniest, profoundest, and most exactingly written of any appearing in print.

"[14] Of Rumor and Other Stories, Frederick Barthelme said "The world through James Robison's eyes is such a dazzling show of delicacy and precision that heartbreak turns on the choice of a verb.

[26] Normally reticent, he granted an interview to Smokelong Quarterly,[27] in which he discussed aesthetics: "I saw a Nova-like show about dark matter, how scientists know that it exists because some light waves firing to earth bend and curve all around a precisely shaped nothingness.

I thought, boy howdy, this is how so much art, plastic or literary, from the 20th and 21st Century behaves: Its true content is what it refuses to describe explicitly, but the shape of its meaning may be precisely limned by implication."

Contributing to a piece posted in BLIP, he wrote:[28] "For years, decades, I tried to teach the students to do lightning strike stuff.

In an interview with Meg Pokrass at Fictionaut Five,[30] he said: "A story must have three ingredients, like, oral surgery, Puccini’s Turandot, and divorce.

If I have three large thoughts, intuitions or detections about three varied things, I’ll launch a story."