Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) 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 was born and raised in Tacoma, Washington, and moved to San Francisco in the mid-1950s when he became involved in the emerging beat scene. During the 1960s, he became one of the most prominent and prolific writers of the counterculture. Out of this period came some of his most famous works, the best known of which are Trout Fishing in America; his collection of poetry, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster; and his collection of stories, Revenge of the Lawn. Translated the world over, his works helped establish him as one of the most significant American writers of his generation. As his popularity waned towards the end of the 1970s, he became increasingly disillusioned about his work and his life. He committed suicide in 1984. He was the author of eleven novels, ten volumes of poetry, a collection of short stories, and miscellaneous nonfiction pieces, works that often employed parody, satire, and black comedy.
All Books By Richard Brautigan
A Confederate General from Big Sur
- By: Richard Brautigan
- Narrator: Jim Meskimen
- Length: 3 hours 45 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2017
- Language: English
-
4(3092 ratings)
California, 1957. Lee Mellon believes he is the descendant of the only Confederate general to have come from Big Sur and is himself a seeker of truth in his own modern-day war against the status quo.
For the first time in audio, A Confederate General from Big Sur was the late Richard Brautigan’s first published novel, written when he was twenty-eight.
... Read moreAn Unfortunate Woman
- By: Richard Brautigan
- Narrator: Jim Meskimen
- Length: 3 hours 4 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2016
- Language: English
-
3.8(1503 ratings)
This is Richard Brautigan’s last novel, published posthumously in 2000, now in audio for the first time.
Richard Brautigan was an original–brilliant and wickedly funny. His books resonated with the 1960s, 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 the death of a close friend from cancer.
After Richard Brautigan committed suicide, the manuscript of An Unfortunate Woman was found among his possessions by his only child, daughter Ianthe Brautigan. It had been completed over a year earlier but was still unpublished at the time of his death. Finding that 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.
... Read moreDreaming of Babylon
- By: Richard Brautigan
- Narrator: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 3 hours 29 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2017
- Language: English
-
4.24(1825 ratings)
It is early 1942. You are in San Francisco, and you need a private eye. Sam Spade is rumored to be in Istanbul. The Continental Op has been drafted and is a sergeant in the Aleutians. 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, the hero of Richard Brautigan’s eighth novel, you have scraped the bottom of the private-eye barrel. But you won’t be bored. No, indeed. Because when C. Card finds some bullets for his gun, you will be in for some fast, funny, slam-bang private eye adventures. Unless of course C. Card starts dreaming of Babylon. If C. Card starts dreaming of Babylon, all bets are off.
Not since Trout Fishing in America has Brautigan so successfully combined his wild sense of humor with the incredible poetic imagination he is rightfully famous for around the world. The adventures of seedy, not-too-bright C. Card, as he carefully wends his way between fantasy and reality, Babylon and San Francisco, are a delight to both the mind and the heart.
... Read moreIn Watermelon Sugar
- By: Richard Brautigan
- Narrator: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 2 hours 22 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2017
- Language: English
-
3.81(18061 ratings)
iDEATH is a place where the sun shines a different color 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. In this book, Richard Brautigan discovers and expresses the mood of the counterculture generation.
... Read moreSo the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away
- By: Richard Brautigan
- Narrator: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 3 hours 7 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2016
- Language: English
-
4.05(2249 ratings)
So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away is a beautifully written, brooding gem of a novel set in the Pacific Northwest where Brautigan spent most of his childhood.
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. Through the eyes, ears, and voice of Brautigan’s youthful protagonist, the listener is gently led into a small-town tale where the narrator accidentally shoots and kills his best friend. The novel deals with the repercussions of this tragedy and its recurring theme of “what if,” which fuels anguish, regret, and self-blame, as well as some darkly comic passages of bittersweet romance and despair.
Written and published in 1982, this novel foreshadowed Brautigan’s suicide in 1984. Along with An Unfortunate Woman, this is one of the author’s novels that is a fitting epitaph to an author who is a complex, contradictory, and often misunderstood genius.
... Read moreThe Abortion
- By: Richard Brautigan
- Narrator: Will Damron
- Length: 4 hours 23 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2016
- Language: English
-
3.97(5189 ratings)
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, the Kingdom of Fire and Water, they experience a series of strange encounters.
... Read moreThe Hawkline Monster
- By: Richard Brautigan
- Narrator: Johnathan McClain
- Length: 3 hours 3 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2016
- Language: English
-
3.86(4137 ratings)
The time is 1902, the setting eastern Oregon. Magic Child, a fifteen-year-old Native American girl, wanders into the wrong whorehouse looking for the right men.
She finds Cameron and Greer, two gunmen taking a timeout from the game after an aborted job in Hawaii.
Their violent past doesn’t concern Magic Child. She wants them to kill a monster for her, one she says lives in the ice caves under the basement of Miss Hawkline’s yellow house, and one she says has killed before.
But the more she tells them about the monster, the more her story unravels until it isn’t clear if the monster is even real, or if anything else is.
Richard Brautigan’s classic surrealist novel has inspired readers for decades with its wild, witty, and bizarre encounters with western-themed psychedelia.
... Read moreTrout Fishing in America
- By: Richard Brautigan
- Narrator: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 3 hours 29 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2016
- Language: English
-
3.76(11071 ratings)
In its first time in audio and with an introduction written and read by poet Billy Collins, Trout Fishing in America is an indescribable romp, by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through America’s culture.
Richard Brautigan’s world is one of gentle magic and marvelous laughter, of the incredibly beautiful and the beautifully incredible. Trout Fishing in America is a pseudonym for the miraculous. A journey which begins at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco’s Washington Square, which wanders through the wonders of America’s rural waterways, and which ends, inevitably, with mayonnaise. Funny, wild, and sweet, Trout Fishing in America is an incomparable guidebook to the delights of exploration–both of land and mind.
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. His early books became required reading for the hip generation, and on its publication, Trout Fishing in America, considered by many as his best novel, became an international bestseller.With it Brautigan caught the public’s attention and became a cult hero. By 1970 Trout Fishing in America had become the namesake of a commune, a free school, an underground newspaper, and more.
... Read more