Trout Fishing in America
Richard Brautigan
“The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal”
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Richard Brautigan’s cult classic novel reissued to mark the 30th Anniversary of his death. Introduced by Neil Gaiman
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.
“Streets ahead of Burroughs or Kerouac”
observer
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“A book infused with a bucolic surrealism and mournful psychedelia 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
“Delicate, fantastic and very funny”
Malcolm Bradbury
“He writes with a kind of free-wheeling, zany magic”
guardian
“A master of American black absurdism”
financial Times
Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington where he spent much of his youth, before moving to San Francisco where he became involved with other writers in the Beat Movement. During the Sixties he became one of the most prolific and prominent members of the counter-cultural movement, and wrote some of his most famous novels including Trout Fishing in America, Sombrero Fallout and A Confederate General from Big Sur. He was found dead in 1984, aged 49, beside a bottle of alcohol and a .44 calibre gun. His daughter, Ianthe Brautigan, has written a biography of her father, You Can’t Catch Death.
“Richard Brautigan’s first novel sold less than 800 copies. His next novel sold 4 million copies. Trout Fishing in America turns 50 this year, and while most novels of that age now seem dated, Brautigan’s work seems particularly so: playful, goofy, fragmentary, optimistic. Trout Fishing in America is worth revisiting for exactly its status as an artifact of that time, a book that reveled in language, and made its writer into an imperfect legend.”
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