WHAT THE CRITICS SAY ABOUT FLYNN'S NOVELS:
About North to Yesterday, winner of awards from the Texas Institute of Letters and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame:
“...provides some of the funniest reading of the year...it introduces a lively and unconventional talent it will be a pleasure to meet again.” Thomas Lask, New York Times
“A modern cattle drive is the focus of a shrewd and touching satire on the vanishing West.” Eliot Fremont-Smith, List of the Year’s Outstanding Fiction, New York Times
“...has to be one of the funniest books of the year. But it is also a thoughtful tragicomic parable of all America.” Brian Garfield, Saturday Review
“A new moving and memorable kind of tall story, one that merges upon legend and even myth.” Walter Van Tilburg Clark
“A Don Quixote in pursuit of an adventure no longer possible...a story at once poignant and comic.” Book of the Month Club
“Above all, it has a high inventive humor that shnes through antique dreams and honest tragedy and provides an uncommon experience.” A.B. Guthrie, Jr.
In The House of the Lord:
“Excellent...As immediate as a headline, as immemorial as man’s quest for God.” Edmund Fuller, Wall Street Journal.
“...confronts us with honestly hard questions instead of contrived easy answers, skirts romantic sentimentality in a context which has uniquely been its traditional preserve, and shows us an everyday contemporary saint living precariously in a post-saintly age.” Malcolm Boyd
“Flynn has created a rarity--a good novel about a clergyman.” Philadelphia Inquirer
The Devils Tiger
“An exciting adventure story...a page-turner to the very end.” Jay Brandon
“...a thriller of the best kind, plausible and breathless. altogether an expert piece of work in a genre where originality such as this is rare.” Jacques Barzun
“...a fast-paced and multi-faceted thriller...vividly evoked Tex-Mex landscares, skillful prose, and hunters and predators aplenty.” Rick Riordan
Tie-Fast Country
“...with the compression of poetry and the realism of history, Flynn ties his readers to this tough and tender story...these folks will be remembered.” Jane Roberts Wood
“...vintage Flynn with fascinating though ambivalent characters, each with an abundance of human weaknesses, seeking after his or her own personal vision of happiness, with disturbing and occasionally tragic results.” Elmer Kelton
The Sounds of Rescue, the Signs of Hope:
“...an unforgetable story of a man revealed to his very marrow, to the deepest center of his self, an average young man, no hero, no superman.” Best Sellers
“...a stubbornly obsessing book.” Time magazine
“Reading it is frequently a moving and intellectually provocative experience.” The New York Times Book Review
Seasonal Rain winner of the 1986 Texas Literary Award, “The Saviour of the Bees,” and “Christmas in a Very Small Place,” were winners in the PEN short fiction contest.
“An Impressive collection,” The Kirkus Reviews
“With a soft, almost breathless poignancy he reveals the power of the human heart...Displaying the same talent that made North to Yesterday a classic in Western literature, he demonstrates here the vitality of the short story.” Review of Texas Books
Wanderer Springs winner of Spur Award from Western Writers of America for Best Historical Novel
“Callaghan’s idiosyncratic tales dignify the lives of the townspeople, and give shape, meaning and continuity to their experiences. His own story is told by Flynn with grace, wit and intelligence.” Western American Literature
“...a haunting and beautifully written novel that resonates in the reader’s mind long after the book is finished...a marvelous alchemy of local history, folklore and one man’s search for himself.” Kansas City Star
“...a lowkey, engagingly unpretentious meditation on how memory makes sense of the past.” Booklist
“...at once witty and funny and almost unbearably moving.” Dallas Times Herald
“...perfectly pitched, evocative novel...tells the story of one of those evanescent towns of the American interior that has a lifespan of three or at most four generations.” Publishers Weekly
“Flynn’s abundant talent transforms the annals of a dying town into an exploration of larger human concerns.” Library Journal
“There is wisdom in Wanderer Springs, there is also poetry, and humor, and pain, and charity, and love, and wit, and understanding.” Dallas Morning News
“...a beautiful novel, with subtle, delicate sense of character and of place. It is sad, funny, surprising, always interesting.” Larry McMurtry
“Wanderer Springs sings to me. Flynn draws on urban Texas and its rural past in spinning an original, funny and moving tale of life and death and the confusions in between.” Larry L. King
The Last Klick
“I’ve read many books about the Great War and about Stalingrad and the other horrors of World War Two, but The Last Klick, because it comes out of a contemporary sensibility, presents a greater challenge to the feelings. The madness of jungle warfare is matched moreover by the wicked idiocy of press and television. The United States seen from Vietnam is even more distorting than the experiences of combat. Written with passion and great skill.” Saul Bellow
“...raises disturbing questions about perception and truth, loyalty and betrayal.” Publishers Weekly.
“...amazingly authentic and probing in its subtle evaluations of the kind of society we have become.” Houston Chronicle
“...read it, for the power of its description of the horrors of a war that should never be forgotten, or celebrated.” Houston Post
“Twenty-odd years ago, I had the pleasure of spending a few days traveling around Vietnam with Robert Flynn who was then a freelance correspondent for True Magazine Now, after finishing The Last Klick, I know what he was really up to. He has done a wonderful job of recreating the sights and sounds and smells of Vietnam, and he has captured the ambitions, pretensions and cynicism of the international press corps that covered the war.” Steve Kroft, 60 Minutes (CBS)
“...a provocative book that addresses a number of complex subjects--death, war, media manipulation, and the concept of celebrity...Highly recommended.” Library Journal
“...a book not only for those interested in war and Vietnam but for those interested in the electronic transformation of our culture...both thoughtful and timely...one of the few novelists serious enough to make the attempt to illuminate such issues.” Dallas Morning News
