In a small Pacific Northwest town we meet a young man who has shot dead his best friend with a gun. The novel deals with the repercussions of this tragedy: the anguish, regret, despair and bittersweet romance. Typical of Brautigan's singular style, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is a beautifully written, brooding novel. Its autobiographical prose is a fitting epitaph to this complex, contradictory and often misunderstood writer.
Revenge of the Lawn is Richard Brautigan in miniature and contains no fewer than 62 ultra-short stories set mainly in Tacoma, Washington (where the author grew up) and in the flower-powered San Francisco of the late fifties and early sixties. In their compacted form, which ranges from the murderously short 'The Scarlatti Tilt' to one-page wonders like the sexually poignant poetry of 'An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimetre Film', Brautigan's stories take us into a world where his fleeting glimpses of everyday strangeness leave stories and characters resonating in our heads long after they're gone.
Three masterpieces by “the counterculture’s Mark Twain,” collected in one volume, including the “lost chapters” of Trout Fishing in America (The New York Times Book Review). An author who began his career handing out his work on the streets of San Francisco and went on to become an underground icon of the 1960s and ’70s before his tragic suicide, Richard Brautigan gained a unique literary reputation for such works as In Watermelon Sugar as well as for his gentle spirit, satirical wit, and whimsical, elliptical style. This volume includes three of his most prominent works: Revenge of the Lawn: Originally published in 1971, these bizarre flashes of insight and humor cover everything from “A High Building in Singapore” to the “Perfect California Day.” This is Brautigan’s only collection of stories and includes “The Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America.” The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966: A public library in California where none of the books have ever been published is full of romantic possibilities. But when the librarian and his girlfriend must travel to Tijuana, they have a series of strange encounters in Brautigan’s 1971 novel. So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away: It is 1979, and a man is recalling the events of his twelfth summer, when he bought bullets for his gun instead of a hamburger. Written just before his death, and published in 1982, this novel foreshadowed Brautigan’s suicide. “It’s very hard to label his work. Fairytale meets beat meets counterculture? Surrealism meets folk meets scat? The writing is bursting with colour, humour and imagery, mental flights of fancy, crazed and lurid details. . . . The more you read, the less there seem to be regulations and governing forces, ways of qualifying Brautigan. The mind of the author is simply too unbound, too childlike in its enormous, regenerative capacity to imagine.” —The Guardian
Published 15 years after his suicide, this all-new, youthful work by Brautigan, was written a decade before he found sudden fame with "Trout Fishing in America".
Confident and robust, Jubilee Hitchhiker is an comprehensive biography of late novelist and poet Richard Brautigan, author of Troutfishing in America and A Confederate General from Big Sur, among many others. When Brautigan took his own life in September of 1984 his close friends and network of artists and writers were devastated though not entirely surprised. To many, Brautigan was shrouded in enigma, erratic and unpredictable in his habits and presentation. But his career was formidable, an inspiration to young writers like Hjortsberg trying to get their start. Brautigan's career wove its way through both the Beat–influenced San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950s and the "Flower Power" hippie movement of the 1960s; while he never claimed direct artistic involvement with either period, Jubilee Hitchhiker also delves deeply into the spirited times in which he lived. As Hjortsberg guides us through his search to uncover Brautigan as a man the reader is pulled deeply into the writer's world. Ultimately this is a work that seeks to connect the Brautigan known to his fans with the man who ended his life so abruptly in 1984 while revealing the close ties between his writing and the actual events of his life. Part history, part biography, and part memoir this etches the portrait of a man destroyed by his genius.
When you hire C.Card, you have scraped the bottom of the private eye barrel. And when Card is hired to steal a body from the morgue, he needs to stop dreaming, find bullets for his gun and get there before someone else does. Not since Trout Fishing in America has Brautigan so successfully combined his wild sense of humour with his famous poetic imagination. In this parody of the hard-boiled crime novel, the adventures of seedy, not-too-bright C.Card are a delight to both the mind and the heart.
A heartbroken American writer starts a story about an ice-cold sombrero that falls inexplicably from the sky and lands in the centre of a small Southwest town. Devastated by the departure of his gorgeous Japanese girlfriend, he cannot concentrate on his writing and in frustration he throws away his beginning. But as the man searches through his apartment for strands of his lost love's hair, the discarded story in the wastepaper basket - through some kind of elaborate origami - carries on without him. Arguments over the sombrero begin, one thing leads to another and before long all hell breaks loose in the normally sleep town. Brautigan's fertile imagination twists and pulls at the ensuing chaos to come up with a tender, moving, surreal and incredibly funny tale that is told by a writer at the very peak of his creative powers.
Magic Child, a fifteen-year old Indian girl, wanders into the wrong whorehouse. She is looking for the right men to kill the monster. The monster that lives in the ice caves under the basement of Miss Hawkline's yellow house. Richard Brautigan takes the reader on a heroic, magical adventure through Eastern Oregon. The Hawkline Monster confirms his place as one of the twentieth century's most exciting writers.
