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Critical Praise for Patterns of Illusion

• This collection of always-original stories and a novella is fascinating, deeply moving, often lyrical, and occasionally brilliantly bizarre. Hoggard knows as much as anyone on earth about the small tender mercies and brutalities of people, whether intimately together or breaking apart. He describes the human heart with a poignant lyricism and sometimes brutal hurting – and he understands well the demon soul. I have seldom read anyone so well-tuned to the rhythms of children and fractured families. It is as if John Cheever had morphed with Raymond Chandler and Carson McCullers somewhere in that vast land of Texas. The writing is simple, occasionally almost delicate, yet layered with interpretive possibilities. Always the stories are affecting for the depth of love revealed, and for the raw emotion that grows out of Hoggard's quiet approach that eventually explodes with power, or with surprising bursts of hilarious laughter. Herein also lies the best dialogue I have read in a long long time. Hoggard is a poet, a seer, an astute psychologist, and a truly wonderful writer.

  — John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War, Nirvana Blues, The Voice of the Butterfly and other works.

• James Hoggard writes with classical perspective, zest for idiom and dialogue, and the rare ability to articulate the usually inarticulate. These stories, like lyric or dramatic poems, bring light and comfort to the unresolvable problems of the human heart and human relationships: those enmeshed in family, parents and children, wives, husbands and lovers, as well as the lonely and the lost.

  — Marshall Terry, author of Tom Northway, Dallas Stories and Angels Prostate Fall.

Reviews

• This collection of always-original stories and a novella is fascinating, deeply moving, often lyrical, and occasionally brilliantly bizarre. Hoggard knows as much as anyone on earth about the small tender mercies and brutalities of people, whether intimately together or breaking apart. He describes the human heart with a poignant lyricism and sometimes brutal hurting – and he understands well the demon soul. I have seldom read anyone so well-tuned to the rhythms of children and fractured families. It is as if John Cheever had morphed with Raymond Chandler and Carson McCullers somewhere in that vast land of Texas. The writing is simple, occasionally almost delicate, yet layered with interpretive possibilities. Always the stories are affecting for the depth of love revealed, and for the raw emotion that grows out of Hoggard's quiet approach that eventually explodes with power, or with surprising bursts of hilarious laughter. Herein also lies the best dialogue I have read in a long long time. Hoggard is a poet, a seer, an astute psychologist, and a truly wonderful writer. --John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War, Nirvana Blues, The Voice of the Butterfly and other works.