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.
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.
David Burkett is the scion of a family of wealthy timber barons. Searching for the truth of what his family has reaped upon the earth, David looks closely at the root of his father's evil and threatens, like Icarus, to destroy himself.
"Reading Jim Harrison is about as close as one can come in contemporary fiction to experiencing the abundant pleasures of living."-Boston Globe
The Woman Lit by Fireflies is a rollicking collection of three novellas that spans the odd contours of the American landscape. It introduces Harrison's beloved character Brown Dog, an ex-Bible student with raucously asocial tendencies who rescues the preserved body of an Indian chief from the depths of Lake Superior in a caper that nets a wildly unexpected bounty. Elsewhere, a band of sixties radicals reunite to free an old comrade from a Mexican jail. And a fifty-year-old suburban housewife flees quietly from her abusive businessman husband and explores the bittersweet pageant of the preceding years within the sanctuary of an Iowa cornfield.
Celebrated author Jim Harrison delivers a collection of three novellas infused with the wisdom and wit that have made him a master writer. The title novella, "The Summer He Didn't Die", introduces us to Brown Dog, a hapless but charming Michigan Indian trying to parent his two stepchildren on meager resources. "Republican Wives" is a riotous satire on the sexual neuroses of the political right and the irrational nature of love. "Tracking" tells the author's life story as a tale of the places that have marked it.
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”.
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.
"One of America's great literary treasures, Harrison delivers not one but two works: 'The Land of Unlikeness,' in which a washed-up sixty-year-old academic returns to his Michigan home for renewal, and ['The River Swimmer'], in which an Upper Peninsula farm boy sees ghostly creatures in the waters of the nearby lake. Magic realism à la Harrison?"-Library Journal
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.
'A classic Harrison novel, complete with humorous and introspective characters.''Library Journal
The collection's title novella, "The Farmer's Daughter," opens in the unforgettable voice of a fifteen-year-old girl living a life of solitude in rural Montana, where she has recently moved. Home-schooled by parents who don't fully understand her, she finds escape in the rapture of playing piano and exploring the gorgeous countryside on her horse. Several important mentors teach her that there's more to life than her fundamentalist mother wants her to know—and then her mother runs off with another man, leaving the girl to deal mostly alone with an unexpected assault that tests her mettle just as she was supposed to begin a normal teenage life.
In the next novella, Harrison picks up the thread of beloved recurring character Brown Dog, who when we last saw him was in Toronto to save his developmentally disabled adopted daughter, Berry, from being locked in an institution. But Toronto has run out of welcome, and Brown Dog and an unexpected benefactor hatch a crazy plan to sneak Berry back into the States on the tour bus of an Indian rock band called Thunderskins.
Harrison's final tale, "Games of Night," is the memoir of a retired lycanthrope in contemporary times. Misdiagnosed with a rare blood disorder brought on by the bite of a Mexican hummingbird, the protagonist attempts to lead a normal life, one that is nevertheless punctuated by hazy, feverish episodes of epic lust, physical appetite, athletic exertions, and outbursts of violence under the full moon.
"Harrison (Legends of the Fall) has over decades won a durable following for verse and fiction about the wild places, solitudes, and the exhilarations of the American West."—Publishers Weekly
"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.
"[F]unny, spirited....Harrison is consistently witty and engaging as he drives home his timeless theme: that change can be beneficial at any point in life."-Publishers Weekly
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.
“Reading Jim Harrison is about as close as one can come in contemporary fiction to experiencing the abundant pleasures of living.”—Boston Globe, praise for the author
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.
“[Harrison is] among the most indelible American novelists of the last hundred years.”—New York Times, praise for the author
