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Trout Fishing in America / The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar

Name: Trout Fishing in America / The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar
Rating: 4.15 (9826 reviews)
Author: Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan January 1, 1967

4.15 9.8k Ratings

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Synopsis

An omnibus edition of three counterculture classics by Richard Brautigan that embody the spirit of the 1960s.
Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through America’s rural waterways; 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; and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is a collection of nearly 100 poems, first published in 1968.

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Trout Fishing in America

★ 3.76

Richard Brautigan

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 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 includes an introduction by the poet Billy Collins, who first encountered Brautigan's work as a student in California.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

★ 4.1

J.D. Salinger

This book contains two separate stories: "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" is the first, and "Seymour: An Introduction" is the second.

"Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" is a story about the Glass family, narrated by Buddy, the second oldest brother. Buddy is attending his brother Seymour's wedding to a gal named Muriel, but he's on Army leave during active duty in World War II. At the wedding, everyone is stunned when Seymour does not show up.

The action of the story picks up when several characters end up carpooling together following the failed wedding. The others (the Matron of Honor and her husband, and a couple of stragglers) are talking about Seymour and the disappointment of his not showing up, and Buddy never tells them that he is secretly Seymour's brother, so they talk more openly with him than they otherwise would.

They criticize Seymour and speculate about his character flaws and deficiencies, but Buddy finds their assessments quite judgmental and biased. He then decides to tell the car who he really is, shaming them for their loose criticisms.

He finds Seymour's journal, and he discovers a strange message from their sister Boo Boo for Seymour on their bathroom mirror: "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom/ taller far than a tall man." This is a fragment from the Greek poet Sappho.

"Seymour: An Introduction" is a kind of elegy for Seymour from Buddy, told in the form of an introduction to the reader. The reader makes Seymour's acquaintance while knowing that Seymour technically isn't alive when the story is published, having killed himself in 1948.

This portion of the story is told in stream of consciousness, and it discusses Eastern religious mysticism.

Chess Story

★ 4.27

Stefan Zweig

Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.

Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig's story.

This new translation of Chess Story brings out the work's unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

★ 3.95

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Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

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Douglas Coupland

Andy, Dag and Claire have been handed a society priced beyond their means. Twentysomethings, brought up with divorce, Watergate and Three Mile Island, and scarred by the 80s fall-out of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan, they represent the new generation — Generation X.
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★ 3.96

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‘Everything everybody does is so—I don’t know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much only in a different way.’

First published in The New Yorker as two sequential stories, ‘Franny’ and ‘Zooey’ offer a dual portrait of the two youngest members of J. D. Salinger’s fictional Glass family.

Franny Glass is a pretty, effervescent college student on a date with her intellectually confident boyfriend, Lane. They appear to be the perfect couple, but as they struggle to communicate with each other about the things they really care about, slowly their true feelings come to the surface. The second story in this book, ‘Zooey’, plunges us into the world of her ethereal, sophisticated family. When Franny’s emotional and spiritual doubts reach new heights, her older brother Zooey, a misanthropic former child genius, offers her consolation and brotherly advice.

Written in Salinger’s typically irreverent style, these two stories offer a touching snapshot of the distraught mindset of early adulthood and are full of the insightful emotional observations and witty turns of phrase that have helped make Salinger’s reputation what it is today.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie / The Girls of Slender Means / The Driver’s Seat / The Only Problem

★ 3.8

Muriel Spark

The brevity of Muriel Spark's novels is equaled only by their brilliance. These four novels, each a miniature masterpiece, illustrate her development over four decades. Despite the seriousness of their themes, all four are fantastic comedies of manners, bristling with wit.

Spark's most celebrated novel, THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE, tells the story of a charismatic schoolteacher's catastrophic effect on her pupils. THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS is a beautifully drawn portrait of young women living in a hostel in London in the giddy postwar days of 1945. THE DRIVER'S SEAT follows the final haunted hours of a woman descending into madness. And THE ONLY PROBLEM is a witty fable about suffering that brings the Book of Job to bear on contemporary terrorism.

Characters are vividly etched in a few words; earth-shaking events are lightly touched on. Yet underneath the glittering surface there is an obsessive probing of metaphysical questions: the meaning of good and evil, the need for salvation, the search for significance.

Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust

★ 3.89

Nathanael West

Miss Lonelyhearts

Miss Lonelyhearts was a newspaper reporter, so named because he had been assigned to write the agony column, to answer the letters from Desperate, Sick-of-It-All, Disillusioned. A joke at first; but then he was caught up, terrifyingly, in a vision of suffering, and he sought a way out, turning first here, then there—Art, Sex, Religion. Shrike, the cynical editor, the friend and enemy, compulsively destroyed each of his friend’s gestures toward idealism. Together, in the city’s dim underworld, Shrike and Miss Lonelyhearts turn round and round in a loathsome dance, unresolvable, hating until death…

The Day of the Locust

To Hollywood comes Tod Hackett, hoping for a career in scene designing, but he finds the way hard and falls in with others—extras, technicians, old vaudeville hands—who are also in difficulty. Around him he sees the great mass of inland Americans who have retired to California in expectation of health and ease. But boredom consumes them, their own emptiness maddens them; they search out any abnormality in their lust for excitement—drugs, perversion, crime. In the end only blood will serve; unreasoned, undirected violence. The day of the locust is at hand…