Canons

1 primary work • 7 total works

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.

So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away

by Richard Brautigan

Published April 1983

So the Wind Won't Blow it all Away is a beautifully-written, brooding gem of a novel - set in the Pacific Northwest region of Oregon where Brautigan spent most of his childhood.
Through the eyes, ears and voice of Brautigan's youthful protagonist the reader is gently led 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 its recurring theme of 'What if...' fuels anguish, regret and self-blame as well as some darkly comic passages of bitter-sweet romance and despair.
Taken with the recently discovered, An Unfortunate Woman, these two late Brautigan novels are a fitting epitaph to a complex, contradictory and often misunderstood genius.

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.

Dreaming of Babylon

by Richard Brautigan

Published 13 April 1978

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.

The Hawkline Monster

by Richard Brautigan

Published 1 September 1974

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.