The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh

Best known for his novel Trout Fishing in America, American writer Richard Gary Brautigan (1935–1984) published eleven novels, ten poetry collections, and two story collections, as well as five volumes of collected work, several nonfiction essays, and a record album of spoken voice recordings. Brautigan’s idiosyncratic style and humor caused him to be identified with the counterculture movement of the 1960s. The authors of many of these 32 essays knew Brautigan personally and professionally; others came to know and respect him through a cultivated connection with his writings. The essays—many of which are new, others of which were published in obscure journals—combine personal remembrance of the man and critical appraisal of his still-controversial works. Includes previously unpublished photographs and artworks.

Thoroughly grounded in the media culture of film and television, mclennan's language obscures the breadth and depth of this work.

This cult classic from the author of Trout Fishing in America “reads like a spaghetti Western crossed with Frankenstein, viewed through an opium haze” (The Sunday Times). The celebrated poet, novelist, and guru of the 1960s San Francisco literary scene, Richard Brautigan brings his highly original Gonzo style to this surreal parody Western. The time is 1902, the setting eastern Oregon. In the ice caves underneath Professor Hawkline’s house, a deadly monster lurks. It’s already turned the professor into an elephant foot umbrella stand, and now his two beautiful daughters have hired a pair of gunslingers to put a stop to the mayhem. But Hawkline Manor is full of curiosities and secrets, like the professor’s underground laboratory where his work on The Chemicals remains unfinished. And as the gunslingers pursue their peculiar quarry, they encounter monstrous mischief, amorous advances, and evil that is all too human. “Bursting with colour, humour and imagery, Brautigan’s virtuoso prose is rooted in his rural past.” —The Guardian

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Richard Brautigan was a counter-cultural celebrity, a writer that the would-be hip just had to read. The problem was that his fame did not rest on the considerable literary virtues of his work but, to a great extent, on a hippie image exemplified by the photograph of him on the cover of his breakthrough novel, 'Trout Fishing in America'. When nobody wanted tie-dye shirts and gurus any more, they didn’t want Brautigan either. Academics have followed the public’s lead: this is the first book-length study of Brautigan in English for 30 years. Its purpose is to reclaim Brautigan’s reputation. Dr. John Tanner analyses Brautigan’s fiction against the background of the cultural and literary upheavals from which it emerged and demonstrates that Brautigan is no mere Sixties curio but an innovative and vibrant American voice ignored for far too long.

Through the work of 23 poets collected here, readers will experience the variety of writing represented by above/ground press of Maxville, Ontario. Mclennan's tastes are notoriously Catholic and demonstrate an awareness of both the historic tradition of Canadian literature (Newlove, Bowering, Coleman) and an acute affection for the contemporary (Holmes, Bolster, McElroy). Groundswell includes a complete, detailed bibliography of all publishing activity by above/ground press from 1993 to 2003.

An omnibus edition of three counterculture classics by Richard Brautigan that embody the spirit of the 1960s Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through America's rural waterways; In Watermelon Sugar expresses the mood of a new generation, revealing death as a place where people travel the length of their dreams, rejecting violence and hate; and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is a collection of nearly 100 poems, first published in 1968.

Few contemporary American writers have been subjected to as much laudatory abuse as Richard Brautigan who, having become famous in the 1960s, was made a cult figure for the hippy generation and was systematically refused recognition as a major novelist once the sentimental wave of the ‘greening of America’ had passed. Marc Chénetier’s study, originally published in 1983, was the first book to attempt to assess Brautigan’s writing art which, far from weakening over the years, had become, amid critical indifference, more secure in its techniques, more all-encompassing in its strategy and more iconoclastic in its goals. In analysing most of Brautigan’s fictional works in the light of his poetics, it examines the mechanisms of his metafictional and deconstructive offensive and indicates the direction in which Brautigan was moving at the time.