Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was the author of over thirty-five books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, including Legends of the Fall, The Road Home, The English Major, and The Farmer’s Daughter. His writing appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and the New York Times. He earned a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association. His work has been recognized worldwide and published in twenty-two languages.
All Books By Jim Harrison
A Good Day to Die
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 4 hours 55 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2019
- Language: English
-
3.89(1087 ratings)
Their plans were conceived in a drunken excitement and resulted in more horror than any of them could have imagined. There was the poet able to retreat into beatific reveries of superb fishing in cold, fast streams; the Vietnam vet consumed by uppers, downers, and violence; and the girl who loved only one of them–at first.
With their ideals ostensibly in order, they set out from Florida to save the Grand Canyon from a dam they believed was being built. Along with the tape deck for the car, the liquor, and the drugs, there was also a case of dynamite.
... Read moreA Really Big Lunch
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Joe Barrett
- Length: 8 hours 47 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2017
- Language: English
-
4.02(617 ratings)
Jim Harrison’s legendary gourmandise is on full display in A Really Big Lunch. From the titular New Yorker piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses to pieces from Brick, Playboy, Kermit Lynch’s newsletter, and others, from the relationship between hunter and prey to the obscure language of wine reviews, A Really Big Lunch is shot through with Harrison’s pointed apercus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines, the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades. A Really Big Lunch is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.
... Read moreBrown Dog
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 18 hours 10 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2013
- Language: English
-
4.15(1756 ratings)
New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison is one of America’s most beloved writers, and of all his creations, Brown Dog–a bawdy, reckless, down-on-his-luck Michigan Indian–has earned cult status with readers in the more than two decades since his first appearance. For the first time, Brown Dog gathers all the Brown Dog novellas, including one never before published, into one volume–the ideal introduction (or reintroduction) to Harrison’s irresistible Everyman.
In these novellas, BD rescues the preserved body of an Indian from Lake Superior’s cold waters; overindulges in food, drink, and women while just scraping by in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; wanders Los Angeles in search of an ersatz Native activist who stole his bearskin; adopts two Native children; and flees the authorities then returns across the Canadian border aboard an Indian rock band’s tour bus. The collection culminates with “He Dog,” never before published, which finds BD marginally employed and still looking for love (or sometimes just a few beers and a roll in the hay) as he goes on a road trip from Michigan to Montana and back, arriving home to the prospect of family stability, and, perhaps, a chance at redemption.
Brown Dog underscores Harrison’s place as one of America’s most irrepressible writers and one of the finest practitioners of the novella form.
... Read moreDalva
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Stacey Glemboski
- Length: 13 hours 24 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
-
4.18(3139 ratings)
From the New York Times bestselling author of Legends of the Fall comes a beautifully crafted story of one woman’s journey to find her son.
From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam–and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul.
One of Harrison’s most ambitious novels, Dalva explores an extraordinary family through the strong, engaging voice of an unforgettable woman, confirming Harrison as one of America’s most memorable writers.
... Read moreFarmer
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Christian Baskous
- Length: 5 hours 43 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2019
- Language: English
-
3.72(1020 ratings)
In Farmer, Jim Harrison tells the story of Joseph, a forty-three-year-old farmer and school teacher who suddenly finds himself at a crossroads. Forced to choose between two lovers–one a younger woman, the other his beautiful childhood friend–he must also decide whether or not to stay on the farm or finally seek the wider, broader horizons he has avoided all his life.
Returning Harrison fans will be ecstatic to find this early Harrison work available in audio, and for new readers, this work serves as the perfect introduction to Harrison’s remarkable insight, storytelling, and evocation of the natural world.
... Read moreJulip
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Ray Porter
- Length: 8 hours 53 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2009
- Language: English
-
3.95(651 ratings)
Jim Harrison takes us on a journey of the human heart in three novellas in which the irresistible pull of nature becomes a magnificent backdrop for exploring the toughest questions about life and love.
Julip follows a bright and resourceful young woman as she tries to spring her brother from a Florida jail after he shot three of her former lovers “below the belt.”
The Seven-Ounce Man continues the picaresque adventures of Brown Dog, a Michigan scoundrel who loves to eat, drink, and chase women, all while sailing along in the bottom ten percent.
The Beige Dolorosa is the haunting tale of an academic who, recovering from the repercussions of a sexual-harassment scandal, turns to the natural world for solace.
... Read moreLegends of the Fall
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 8 hours 23 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2013
- Language: English
-
4.05(8664 ratings)
From one of America’s most versatile and celebrated writers, Legends of the Fall is Jim Harrison’s classic trilogy of epic novellas.
The publication of this magnificent trilogy of short novels–Legends of the Fall, Revenge, and The Man Who Gave Up His Name–confirmed Jim Harrison’s reputation as one of the finest American writers of his generation. These absorbing novellas explore the theme of revenge and the actions to which people resort when their lives or goals are threatened, adding up to an extraordinary vision of the twentieth-century man.
Set in the Rocky Mountains, Legends of the Fall is the epic tale of three brothers and their lives of passion, madness, exploration, and danger at the beginning of World War I. In Revenge, love causes the course of a man’s life to be savagely and irrevocably altered. And in The Man Who Gave Up His Name, a man named Nordstrom is unable to relinquish his consuming obsessions with women, dancing, and food.
... Read moreReturning to Earth
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Traci Svendsgaard
- Length: 7 hours 43 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2006
- Language: English
-
4.04(1746 ratings)
In this sequel to Harrison’s True North, Donald Burkett, a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man, is dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. While his wife, Cynthia, transcribes, Donald begins dictating his family history for the benefit of their children, stories that he never before has shared.
As old crimes, dreams, wounds, and sacred moments are revived for the members of Donald’s family, each is affected in different and profound ways. Each will describe in his or her own voice the inner journey catalyzed by Donald’s death and legacy.
This is a deeply moving book about origins and endings, about honoring life, honoring the dead, and finding redemption in unlikely places.
... Read more
Sundog
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Traber Burns
- Length: 7 hours 58 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
-
3.99(926 ratings)
The New York Times bestselling author of numerous books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth, Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics.
Sundog is a powerful novel about the life and loves of a foreman named Robert Corvus Strang, who worked on giant dam projects around the world until he was crippled in a fall down a three-hundred-foot dam. Now as he tries to regain use of his legs, he has a chance to reassess his life, and a blase journalist who has heard of Strang’s reputation in the field arrives to draw him out about his various incarnations.
Strang, who has the violently heightened sensibilities of a man who has gone to the limits and back, recounts his monumental life moving from Michigan to Africa and the Amazon, including his several marriages, his children, and dozens of lovers. Sundog is a story as true and gripping as real life, and ultimately as victorious.
... Read moreThe Ancient Minstrel
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 6 hours 37 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2016
- Language: English
-
3.68(827 ratings)
New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison is one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. In The Ancient Minstrel, Harrison delivers three novellas that highlight his phenomenal range as a writer, shot through with his trademark wit and keen insight into the human condition.
Harrison has tremendous fun with his own reputation in the title novella, about an aging writer in Montana who spars with his estranged wife, with whom he still shares a home; weathers the slings and arrows of literary success; and tries to cope with the sow he buys on a whim and the unplanned litter of piglets that follow soon after. In “Eggs,” a Montana woman reminisces about staying in London with her grandparents and collecting eggs at their country house. Years later, having never had a child, she attempts to do so. And in “The Case of the Howling Buddhas,” retired Detective Sunderson–a recurring character from Harrison’s New York Times bestsellers The Great Leader and The Big Seven–is hired as a private investigator to look into a bizarre cult that achieves satori by howling along with howler monkeys at the zoo.
Fresh, incisive, and endlessly entertaining, with moments of both profound wisdom and sublime humor, The Ancient Minstrel is an exceptional reminder of why Jim Harrison is one of the most cherished and important writers at work today.
... Read moreThe Big Seven
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Jim Meskimen
- Length: 9 hours 39 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2015
- Language: English
-
3.42(787 ratings)
Jim Harrison is one of our most renowned and popular authors, and his last novel, The Great Leader, was one of the most successful in a decorated career: it appeared on the New York Times extended bestseller list and was a national bestseller with rapturous reviews. His darkly comic follow-up, The Big Seven, sends Detective Sunderson to confront his new neighbors, a gun-nut family who live outside the law in rural Michigan.
Detective Sunderson has fled troubles on the home front and bought himself a hunting cabin in a remote area of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. No sooner has he settled in than he realizes his new neighbors are creating even more havoc than the Great Leader did. A family of outlaws, armed to the teeth, the Ameses have local law enforcement too intimidated to take them on. Then Sunderson’s cleaning lady, a comely young Ames woman, is murdered, and black sheep brother Lemuel Ames seeks Sunderson’s advice on a crime novel he’s writing, which may not be fiction. Sunderson must struggle with the evil within himself and the far greater, more expansive evil of his neighbor.
In a story shot through with wit, bedlam, and Sunderson’s attempts to enumerate and master the seven deadly sins, The Big Seven is a superb reminder of why Jim Harrison is one of America’s most irrepressible writers.
... Read moreThe English Major
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 7 hours 8 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2008
- Language: English
-
3.6(2886 ratings)
“It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn’t.” With these words, Jim Harrison begins a riotous, moving novel that sends a sixty-something man on a quest of self-rediscovery. Newly divorced and robbed of his farm by his real-estate shark of an ex-wife, Cliff is off on a road trip across America, on a mission to rename all the states and state birds to overcome the banal names men have given them.
Cliff’s adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student from his high school teaching days twenty-some years before, to a snake farm in Arizona owned by an old classmate, and to the high-octane existence of his son, a big-time movie producer. A map of a man’s journey into—and out of—himself, The English Major is vintage Harrison: reflective, big-picture American, and replete with wicked wit.
... Read moreThe Farmer’s Daughter
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 8 hours 54 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2010
- Language: English
-
3.72(1020 ratings)
Jim Harrison’s numerous works have established him as one of the most beloved and popular authors in American fiction. His novel The English Major was a National Indie Bestseller, a New York Times Book Review Notable Title, and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. This collection of novellas finds him writing at the height of his powers–and in fresh and audacious new directions.
The three stories in The Farmer’s Daughter are as different as they are unforgettable. Written in the voice of a home-schooled fifteen-year-old girl in rural Montana, the title novella is an uncompromising, beautiful tale of an extraordinary character whose youth intersects with unexpected brutality and the reserves she must draw on to make herself whole. In another, Harrison’s beloved recurring character Brown Dog, still looking for love, escapes from Canada back to the States on the tour bus of an Indian rock band called Thunderskins. And finally, a retired werewolf, misdiagnosed with a rare blood disorder brought on by the bite of a Mexican hummingbird, attempts to lead a normal life but is nevertheless plagued by hazy, feverish episodes of epic lust, physical appetite, athletic exertions, and outbursts of violence under the full moon.
The Farmer’s Daughter is a memorable portrait of three decidedly unconventional American lives. With wit, poignancy, and an unbounded love for his characters, Jim Harrison has again reminded us why he is one of the most cherished and important authors at work today.
... Read moreThe Great Leader
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Ray Porter
- Length: 8 hours 41 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2011
- Language: English
-
3.56(1500 ratings)
Author Jim Harrison has won international acclaim for his masterful body of work, including over thirty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In his most original work to date, Harrison delivers an enthralling, witty, and expertly crafted novel following one man’s hunt for an elusive cult leader, dubbed the Great Leader.
On the verge of retirement, Detective Sunderson begins to investigate a hedonistic cult, which has set up camp near his home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. At first, the self-declared Great Leader seems merely a harmless oddball, but as Sunderson and his sixteen-year-old sidekick dig deeper, they find him more intelligent and sinister than they realized. Recently divorced and frequently pickled in alcohol, Sunderson tracks his quarry from the woods of Michigan to a town in Arizona, filled with criminal border-crossers, and on to Nebraska, where the Great Leader’s most recent recruits have gathered to glorify his questionable religion. But Sunderson’s demons are also in pursuit of him.
Rich with character and humor, The Great Leader is at once a gripping excursion through America’s landscapes and the poignant story of a man grappling with age, lost love, and his own darker nature.
... Read moreThe River Swimmer
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Traber Burns
- Length: 5 hours 5 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2013
- Language: English
-
3.79(1548 ratings)
Jim Harrison is one of America’s most beloved and critically acclaimed authors, and this collection of novellas is Harrison at his most memorable–a brilliant rendering of two men striving to find their way in the world, written with freshness, abundant wit, and profound humanity.
In “The Land of Unlikeness,” sixty-year-old art history academic Clive–a failed artist, divorced and grappling with the vagaries of his declining years–reluctantly returns to his family’s Michigan farmhouse to visit his aging mother. The return to familiar territory triggers a jolt of renewal–of ardor for his high school love, of his relationship with his estranged daughter, and of his own lost love of painting. In the title story, “The River Swimmer,” Harrison ventures into the magical as an Upper Peninsula farm boy is irresistibly drawn to the water as an escape and sees otherworldly creatures there. Faced with the injustice and pressure of coming of age, he takes to the river and follows its siren song all the way across Lake Michigan.
The River Swimmer is a striking portrait of two richly drawn, profoundly human characters and an exceptional reminder of why Jim Harrison is one of the most cherished and important writers at work today.
... Read moreThe Road Home
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Jane Oppenheimer
- Length: 19 hours 4 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
-
4.35(1121 ratings)
The Road Home lies in the shadows of Manifest Destiny and Wounded Knee; it is etched into the landscape of an old man’s memory and into the stubborn dreams of a young man’s heart. In one of Jim Harrison’s greatest works, five members of the Northridge family narrate the tangled epic of their history on the expanses of the Nebraska plains. They strive to understand their fates, to reconcile with demons of the past, to live in accordance with the land and to die with grace. As the family grapples with the mysterious forces that both pull them apart and draw them inextricably back together, they must come to term with life’s greatest and hardest lessons: the deception of passion, the pain of love, the vitality of art, and the supplication to nature’s generosity and fury.
... Read moreThe Search for the Genuine
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Traber Burns
- Length: 12 hours 2 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2022
- Language: English
-
4.29(53 ratings)
The first general nonfiction title in thirty years from a giant of American letters, The Search for the Genuine is a sparkling, definitive collection of Jim Harrison’s essays and journalism–some never before published.
New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was a writer with a poet’s economy of style and trencherman’s appetites and ribald humor.
In The Search for the Genuine, a collection of new and previously published essays, the giant of letters muses on everything from grouse hunting and fishing to Zen Buddhism and matters of the spirit, including reported pieces on Yellowstone and shark-tagging in the open ocean, commentary on writers from Bukowski to Neruda to Peter Matthiessen, and a heartbreaking essay on life–and, for those attempting to cross in the ever-more-dangerous gaps, death–on the US/Mexico border.
Written with Harrison’s trademark humor, compassion, and full-throated zest for life, this chronicle of a modern bon vivant is a feast for fans who may think they know Harrison’s nonfiction, from a true “American original”.
... Read moreThe Summer He Didn’t Die
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Lloyd James
- Length: 8 hours 7 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2006
- Language: English
-
4.01(572 ratings)
Celebrated author Jim Harrison, whose robust, tender, and deeply felt books have made their mark on the American literary landscape, here delivers a collection of three novellas infused with all the wisdom and generous spirit that have made him a master writer.
In the title novella, “The Summer He Didn’t Die,” Brown Dog, a hapless Michigan Indian, is trying to parent his two stepchildren on meager resources; it helps that his charms are irresistible to the new dentist in town.
“Republican Wives” is a riotous satire on the sexual neuroses of the political right and the irrational nature of love—which, when thwarted, can easily turn into an urge to murder.
“Tracking” gives the author’s life story as a tale of the places that have marked it.
With wit as sharp as ever and prose as lush as any Harrison has yet written, The Summer He Didn’t Die is a joyful ode to our journey on this earth.
... Read moreThe Woman Lit by Fireflies
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Ray Porter
- Length: 8 hours 12 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2009
- Language: English
-
4.05(1749 ratings)
Across the odd contours of the American landscape, people are searching for the things that aren’t irretrievably lost, for the incandescent beneath the ordinary. An ex-Bible student with raucously asocial tendencies rescues the preserved body of an Indian chief from the frigid depths of Lake Superior in a caper that nets a wildly unexpected bounty. A band of sixties radicals, now approaching middle age, reunite to free an old comrade from a Mexican jail. A fifty-year-old suburban housewife flees quietly from her abusive businessman husband at a highway rest stop, exploring the bittersweet pageant of the preceding years within the sanctuary of an Iowa cornfield. The Woman Lit by Fireflies is a sweeping tribute to the nation’s heartland and the colorful, courageous people who inhabit it.
... Read moreTrue North
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Christopher Lane
- Length: 10 hours 59 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2005
- Language: English
-
3.92(2078 ratings)
An epic tale that pits a son against the legacy of his family’s desecration of the earth, as well as his father’s more personal violations, Jim Harrison’s True North is a beautiful and moving novel that speaks to the territory in our hearts that calls us back to our roots.
The scion of a family of wealthy timber barons, David Burkett has grown up with a malevolent father and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills. He and his sister Cynthia, a firecracker who scandalizes the family by taking up with the son of their half-Native American gardener, are mostly left to make their own way. As David comes into to adulthood enlightened by three unforgettably intoxicating women, he realizes he must come to terms with his forefathers’ rapacious destruction of the wood of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, as well as with the working people who made their wealth possible. With thirty years of searching for the truth of what his family has done while trying to make amends, David looks closely at the root of his father’s evil–and threatens, like Icarus, to destroy himself.
... Read moreWarlock
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 6 hours 39 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2019
- Language: English
-
3.72(536 ratings)
Johnny Lundgren, a.k.a. Warlock, is an unemployed foundation executive who, after surviving a midlife crisis, finally decides to get a job. Warlock soon gets hired by a crazy but genius doctor as a trouble-shooter, where he’s tasked with everything from battling poachers in the haunted wilderness of northern Michigan to investigating his employer’s wife and son in the seamy underside of Key West. A comedy with one foot in the abyss, Warlock is what the New York Times called “farcical, reflective, luscious, gritty” entertainment from one of this country’s most beloved authors.
... Read moreWolf
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrator: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 7 hours 2 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2019
- Language: English
-
3.82(717 ratings)
Wolf tells the story of a man who–after too many nameless women and drunken nights–leaves Manhattan to roam the wilderness of northern Michigan, hoping to catch a glimpse of the rare wolves that prowl that territory.
Returning Harrison fans will be ecstatic to rediscover this early novel once again, and for new listeners, this work serves as the perfect introduction to Harrison’s remarkable insight, storytelling skill, and evocation of the natural world.
... Read more