SOURCE: Rabinowitz, Stephanie. Review of Cat Scratch Fever, by Robert Kelly. Small Press 9 (Fall 1991): 56.

In the following review of Cat Scratch Fever, Rabinowitz asserts that Kelly’s stories are truly versatile.

The mere scope of Kelly's fictional worlds in this amazing collection of 31 stories testifies to a versatility that is rarely witnessed in today's post-modern writings. The self-reflexive anecdotes and pensive moments in Cat Scratch Fever are photo-real in their simultaneous awareness of language, authorial presence, comic style, metaphor, and emotion.

Both the title story and “Orange” employ a deliberate minimalism to master the blunt and often primal voice of an adolescent boy recounting his rites of passage, in an erotic coming of age tale. In “A Session with the Analyst of Colors,” the ingenious use of second person, “questions” as “acts of aggression,” and that theories' inevitable solipsism combine to illustrate the hilarious ironies of analysis via...