Collected in one volume, three counterculture classics that embody the spirit of the 1960s. Included here are three great works by the incomparable Richard Brautigan: Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through the country’s rural waterways—a book “that has very little to do with trout fishing and a lot to do with the lamenting of a passing pastoral America . . . An instant cult classic” (Financial Times). The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is a collection of nearly one hundred poems, first published in 1968. And 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. During his lifetime, Look magazine observed, “Brautigan is joining Hesse, Golding, Salinger, and Vonnegut as a literary magus to the literate young.” A uniquely imaginative writer of the Beat movement who became an icon of the hippie era, he is still a favorite of readers today.

A book “that has very little to do with trout fishing and a lot to do with the lamenting of a passing pastoral America . . . an instant cult classic” (Financial Times). Richard Brautigan was a literary idol of the 1960s and ’70s who came of age during the heyday of Haight-Ashbury and whose comic genius and iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imaginations of young people everywhere. 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 features an introduction by poet Billy Collins, who first encountered Brautigan’s work as a student in California. From the introduction: “‘Trout Fishing in America’ is a catchphrase that morphs throughout the book into a variety of conceptual and dramatic shapes. At one point it has a physical body that bears such a resemblance to that of Lord Byron that it is brought by ship from Missolonghi to England, in 1824, where it is autopsied. ‘Trout Fishing in America’ is also a slogan that sixth-graders enjoy writing on the backs of first-graders. . . . In one notable exhibition of the title’s variability, ‘Trout Fishing in America’ turns into a gourmet with a taste for walnut catsup and has Maria Callas for a girlfriend. Through such ironic play, Brautigan destabilizes any conventional idea of a book as he begins to create a world where things seem unwilling to stay in their customary places.”

Three books in the manner of their original editions.

Focused around the death of a young boy in a shooting accident in a small western Oregon town in the 1940s, So the Wind Won't Blow it all Away was the last of the author's novels published before his death in 1984.

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 Trout Fishing in America sold two million copies throughout the world. An indescribable romp, the novel is best summed up in one word, mayonnaise.Brautigan was a god of the counterculture, a phenomenon who saw his star rise to fame and fortune, only to plummet during the next decade. Driven to drink and despair, he committed suicide in Bolinas, California, at the age of forty-nine. This new edition, with an introduction by tk, will be published on the 75th anniversary of Brautigan's birth.

"Assumes the form of a traveler's journal, chronicling the protagonists's journey and his oblique ruminations on the suicide of one woman and the death from cancer of another, close friend."--Jacket.

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.

It is early 1942. You are in San Francisco, and you need a private eye. Sam Spade is rumored to be in Istanbul. Philip Marlowe is up at Little Fawn Lake investigating the disappearance of Mrs. Derace Kingsley. Lew Archer is in the army. Who's left? Nobody but C. Card. You haven't heard of C. Card? That's all right. Nobody has. When you hire C. Card, you have scraped the bottom of the private eye barrel. But you won't be bored.