English Professor Featured in The New York Review of Books

The Department of English is excited to announce the release last April of professor Robert Cochran's book Haunted Man's Report: Reading Charles Portis, published by the University of Arkansas Press, and the favorable review the book received in the June 2024 issue of The New York Review of Books.

In the NYRB article "Grand Poobah of the Antigrandiose," Jonathan Lethem writes, "Cochran's volume gathers a great deal of scrupulous research, and even some portion of psycho-biographical speculation, into a persuasive close reading of five novels, plus journalism, a short story, and Portis's single stage play. Cochran brings to light both the sidelong historical ruminations and the sorrowful depths of feeling that admirers have always sensed moving beneath the picaresque plots and the insouciant breezes of Portis's prose."

Cochran's book on Portis, author of True Grit (1968), has likewise been praised by Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams: "What are we Portis fans to do, after re-reading the Little Rock laureate's five novels to pieces? Cochran's smart, engaging critical biography makes a terrific companion volume to Escape Velocity [Jay Jennings's 2012 edited collection of Portis's non-novel writings]. Even grizzled Portisheads will find fresh glimmers of insight."

As Cochran mentions in his preface, he also taught a graduate course for the English Department on Portis' novels in the spring of 2022 while he was wrapping up Haunted Man's Report: "Hilarity is guaranteed, I told the cohort [of class members] at the start. ... But they were all going pro in the lit or lit-crit business (they were a mix of M.A., Ph.D. and M.F.A. candidates), and our task there was to find out if [Portis' collection of writing is] deep too."

In addition to being a professor of English and the author of numerous other books, including Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life and Lights! Camera! Arkansas!: From Broncho Billy to Billy Bob Thornton (co-authored with Suzanne McCray), Cochran is the editor of the University of Arkansas Press' Arkansas Character series and the current director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies.

Professor Bob Cochran, fifth from left, and graduate students in his spring 2022 seminar ENGL 5803/6803: The Novels of Charles Portis.