Brian Gittis
What is it about writing with no chapters and no paragraph breaks that is so intimidating? Why do we miss those gaps of white space on a page when they aren’t there: those little tabs at the beginning of a paragraph, the textless paper at the end of a chapter? No matter how big a Faulkner or Thomas Bernhard fan you are, it’s somehow never a welcoming sight to open a new book to find (gulp) an unbroken wall of text waiting for you. 
In his introduction to the New York Review’s reissue of Russell Hoban’s oddball 1975 novel Turtle Diary, Ed Park characterizes the book as a sort of literary cousin to the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s a humble tale of urban loneliness, quotidian in flavor—which makes it an anomaly in Hoban’s large, very strange, increasingly out-of-print body of work. To extend the music analogy, the Hoban boxed set is a hard-to-label compilation—“Eleanor Rigby,” yes, but also works of elaborate, Wagnerian fantasy, Zappa-level weirdness, and kid-friendly tunes. Through a career that spanned more than seventy books, Hoban tackled post-nuclear apocalypse dystopia (Riddley Walker),