Judith Roof
About the Book
Like cars snaking down the interstate, Judith Roof’s I-96 offers a contemporary collection of singular yet connected short stories fueled by America’s lifeblood: individualism and gasoline.
Roof’s incendiary wit and sly commentary poke at the “-isms” driving our collective road rage . . . regional and political stereotypes, gender and sexual anxieties, parenting and policing, anti-intellectualism and aging, and the being and nothingness that comprise the human condition.
In the vein of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Franz Kafka, Jean Shepherd, and others, just when the protagonists let off the gas, a twist in the route sparks chaos and collision, with others as well as ourselves.
I-96 unfolds traditional literary maps to travel new paths — trapping its characters and readers alike in moving vehicles on this never-ending highway — ever isolated but also refusing the share the road.
About the Author
Over the years and many roads, Judith Roof has worked as a mail room clerk, a machinist, a laundry worker, a factory worker, a hospital admissions registrar, a French teacher, a lawyer, an English and film professor at five universities, an artist and illustrator, and finally a fiction writer.
Now retired, she was the William Shakespeare Chair in English at Rice University. In 2016, she served as Chaire des Amériques at Université Rennes 2. She received a B.A. in French, a J.D., and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from The Ohio State University as well as an MA in French from the University of Toronto.
She is the author of eight monographs, eight edited (or coedited) books, and more than eighty essays on topics related to literature, modern drama, narrative theory, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, posthumanism, film studies, and critical legal studies.
Her nonfiction books include Tone: Writing and the Sound of Feeling (Bloomsbury Press, 2020), The Comic Event: Comedic Performance from the 1950s to the Present (Bloomsbury Press, 2018), What Gender Is, What Gender Does (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), The Poetics of DNA (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), All about Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels (University of Illinois Press, 2002), Reproductions of Reproduction: Imaging Symbolic Change (Routledge, 1997), Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (Columbia University Press, 1996), and A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (Columbia University Press, 1991).
Fiction Books by Judith Roof
Nonfiction Books by Judith Roof
