Picador Books

8 total works

Trout Fishing in America

by Richard Brautigan

Published 23 July 1970

Richard Brautigan's wonderfully zany, hilarious episodic novel set amongst the rural waterways of America.

Here's a journey that begins at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square, wanders through the wonders of America's rural waterways and ends, inevitably, with mayonnaise. With pure inventiveness and free-wheeling energy, the counterpoint to all those angry Beatniks, Brautigan tells the story of rural America, and the hunt for a bit of trout fishing. Funny, wild and sweet, Trout Fishing in America is an incomparable guidebook to the delights of exploration - of a country and a mind.

A Confederate General From Big Sur

by Richard Brautigan

Published 28 January 1971

Jesse and Lee share a house owned by a very nice Chinese dentist, where it rains in the hall. They move to cabins on the cliffs at Big Sur where the deafening croaks of frogs can be temporarily silenced by the cry, 'Campbell's Soup'. Ultimately, we learn how the frogs are permanently silenced . . . and dreams disperse around a fire into 186,000 endings per second. In anticipating flower power and the ideals of the Sixties, Brautigan's debut novel was at least a decade before its time and remains a weird and brilliant classic.

Revenge of the Lawn

by Richard Brautigan

Published 1 December 1971

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. "Revenge of the Lawn" is Brautigan's only collection of short fiction and is generally regarded as the most autobiographical of his published work.

Sombrero Fallout

by Richard Brautigan

Published March 1977

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.

The Abortion

by Richard Brautigan

Published January 1973

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.

Willard and His Bowling Trophies

by Richard Brautigan

Published 1 January 1975

In Watermelon Sugar

by Richard Brautigan

Published 23 July 1970

Tokyo-Montana Express

by Richard Brautigan

Published 1 January 1900