Jim Harrison takes us on a journey of the human heart in three new novellas. 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.
"Pithy and engaging….A peppery mix of redemption and hilarity….Harrison's ability to weave offbeat characters and outrageous circumstances into tight, poetic, and often hilarious fiction is a rare and welcome gift."—Seattle Times
"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 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
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.
“A triumph.”—New Yorker
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.
“This essential collection of six novellas (including the never-before-published “He Dog”) offers an omnibus look at Brown Dog, a pure Harrison creation and a glorious character who will make readers howl with delight…Often moving, frequently funny, these five hundred pages offer the best way to get acquainted (or reacquainted) with one of literature’s great characters.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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.
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
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
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.
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
Slowly dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, Donald Burkett, a Chippewa-Finnish man, begins dictating his family history for the benefit of his children. As old crimes, dreams, wounds, and sacred moments are revived for the members of his family, each is affected in different and profound ways.
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
