Richard Brautigan Books

Three unforgettable Brautigan masterpieces reissued in a one-volume omnibus edition. 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.

Richard Brautigan was the author of ten novels, including a contemporary classic, Trout Fishing in America, nine volumes of poetry, and a collection of stories.Here are three Brautigan novels--A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon and The Hawkline Monster--reissues in a one-volume omnibus edition.

The Abortion is a novel about a California library which accepts books in any form and from any authors who wish to donate—children submit crayoned tales of toys; teens of angst; and elders memoirs—"the unwanted, the lyrical & haunted volumes of American writing". Summoned by a silver bell at all hours, the librarian catalogues the books not by Dewey, but by placement on whatever shelf the author chooses. Then Vida appears. Awkwardly shy, she's described as the world's most beautiful woman. Admen "would have made into a national park if they would have gotten their hands on her." Falling for the reclusive librarian, she gets pregnant and goes to Tijuana for an abortion.

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.

A reclusive young man works in a San Francisco library for unpublishable books. Life's losers, an astonishing number of whom seem to be writers, can bring their manuscripts to the library, where they will be welcomed, registered and shelved. They will not be read, but they will be cherished. In comes Vida, with her manuscript. Her book is about her gorgeous body in which she feels uncomfortable. The librarian makes her feel comfortable, and together they live in the back of the library until a trip to Tijuana changes them in ways neither of them had ever expected.

Richard Brautigan's first novel, reissued to mark the 30th anniversary of his death. Introduced by Black Francis

An Unfortunate Woman, An Unforgettable Journey was the final book written by Richard Brautigan before his death in 1984 and lay unpublished for sixteen years.Originally written in the 160 pages of a loose-leaf notebook, the narrator of the book is trying to come to terms with the death of a friend by going on a personal odyssey which zigzags through time and landscapes, from Oakland to Hawaii, and the wilds of Montana.An Unfortunate Woman, An Unforgettable Journey walks a fine line between fiction and memoir, between dark introspection and a lust for life, and in the last pages in particular, marks a gut-wrenching, intense, and ultimately tragic exit from fiction and life itself for the troubled author.

The time is 1902. The setting, eastern Oregon. Magic Child, a 15-year-old Native American girl, wanders into the wrong whorehouse looking for the right men. She finds Cameron and Greer, two gunmen taking a timeout from the game after an aborted job in Hawaii. Their violent past doesn't concern Magic Child. She wants them to kill a monster for her, one she says lives in the ice caves under the basement of Miss Hawkline's yellow house, and one she says has killed before. But the more she tells them about the monster, the more her story unravels, until it isn't clear if the monster is even real, or if anything else is. Richard Brautigan's classic surrealist novel has inspired for decades with its wild, witty, and bizarre encounters with western-themed psychedelia.

iDEATH is a place where the sun shines a different colour every day and where people travel to the length of their dreams. Rejecting the violence and hate of the old gang at the Forgotten Works, they lead gentle lives in watermelon sugar. In this book, Richard Brautigan discovers and expresses the mood of the counterculture generation.