Richard Brautigan Books In Order

Confederate General from Big Sur

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

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.

Trout Fishing In America A Novel

Richard Brautigan was a literary idol of the 1960s and 1970s whose comic genius and iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imagination of young people everywhere. He came of age during the Haight Ashbury period and has been called the last of the Beats. His early books became required reading for the hip generation, and on its publication Trout Fishing in America became an international bestseller. An indescribable romp, the novel is best summed up in one word: mayonnaise. This new edition includes an introduction by the poet Billy Collins, who first encountered Brautigan’s work as a student in California.

In Watermelon Sugar

Death 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. Brautigan expresses the mood of a new generation.

The Hawkline Monster

The time is 1902, the setting eastern Oregon. Magic Child, a fifteen year old Indian girl, wanders into the wrong who*rehouse looking for the right men to kill the monster that lives in the ice caves under the baseme*nt of Miss Hawkline’s yellow house. What follows is a series of wild, witty, and bizarre encounters. The book was originally published in 1974.

Sombrero Fallout

Concerns a writer trying to cope with the break up of a relationship. Trying to escape his misery, he begins a story about a sombrero that falls out of the sky and lands in a small town. Unable to concentrate he throws the pages in the bin, and that’s when it starts to take on a life of its own.

Dreaming of Babylon

You are in San Francisco, and you need a private eye. Nobody’s left but C. Card. When you hire C. Card, you have scraped the bottom of the private eye barrel. The fast, funny, slam bang adventures of seedy, not too bright C. Card are a delight to both the mind and the heart. The book was originally published in 1977.

So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away

Through the eyes, ears and voice of Brautigan’s youthful protagonist, we are lead gently into a small town tale where the narrator accidentally shoots dead his best friend with a gun. The novel deals with the repercussions of this tragedy and the theme of ‘What if…
‘.

An Unfortunate Woman

Richard Brautigan’s last novel, published in the U.S. for the first time

Richard Brautigan was an original brilliant and wickedly funny, his books resonated with the sixties, making him an overnight counterculture hero. Taken in its entirety, his body of work reveals an artistry that outreaches the literary fads that so quickly swept him up.

Dark, funny, and exquisitely haunting, his final book length fiction explores the fragile, mysterious shadowland surrounding death. Told with classic Brautigan wit, poetic style, and mordant irony, An Unfortunate Woman assumes the form of a peripatetic journal chronicling the protagonist’s travels and oblique ruminations on the suicide of one woman, and a close friend’s death from cancer.

After Richard Brautigan committed suicide, his only child, Ianthe Brautigan, found among his possessions the manuscript of An Unfortunate Woman. It had been completed over a year earlier, but was still unpublished at the time of his death. Finding it was too painful to face her father’s presence page after page, she put the manuscript aside.

Years later, having completed a memoir about her father’s life and death, Ianthe Brautigan reread An Unfortunate Woman, and finally, clear eyed, she saw that it was her father’s work at its best and had to be published.

Revenge of the Lawn

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.

The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writing

On the eve of his departure from Eugene, Oregon, to San Francisco and worldly success, a twenty one year old unpublished writer named Richard Brautigan gave these funny, buoyant stories and poems as a gift to Edna Webster, the beloved mother of both his best friend and his first ‘real’ girlfriend. ‘When I am rich and famous, Edna,’ he told her, ‘this will be your social security.’ The stories and poems show Brautigan as hopelessly lovestruck, cheerily goofy, and at his most disarmingly innocent. We see not only a young man and young artist about to bloom, but also the whole literary sensibility of the 1960s counterculture about to spread its wings and fly.