Cast in the form of a hilariously ribald parody of a literary quarterly, The Tar Baby is a brilliant, audacious, story-filled novel populated by an array of brawling academics and earthy townies. A commemorative issue honoring the late Anatole Waxman-Weissman, the book/journal parodies a number of academic fads and concerns as the various contributors expose their and their subject's many idiosyncrasies while pursuing their own private agendas.
"Clever, witty, and different," Publishers Weekly called the novel upon its original publication in 1973: "Ribald, tongue-in-cheek, Nabokovian." Library Journal's Bruce Allen called it "an object lesson in how visionary idealists become mired in mundaneness, and an ingeniously scatological and funny celebration of unsubduably dirty life forces." Long out of print, this is the first paperback edition of Charyn's most complex and innovative novel.
