Jim Harrison

This collection of novellas featuring the titular Indian underscores Jim Harrison’s place as one of America’s most irrepressible writers.
 
A 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 decades since his first appearance....

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...

Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at 45 Dalva has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now she returns to the bosom of her family and searches for the son she gave up years before.

The son of a wealthy family of timber barons struggles to reconcile himself with the damage his family has done to Michigan's Upper Peninsula--a scarring that cuts deeply into the fabric of his own family.

Their plans were conceived in a drunken excitement and resulted in more horror than any of them could have imagined. There was the poet able to retreat into beatific reveries of superb fishing in cold, fast streams; the Vietnam vet consumed by uppers, downers and violence; and the girl who loved only one of them -- at first. With their ideals ostensibly in order, they set out from Florida to save the Grand Canyon from a dam they believed was being...

Cliff, a sixty-something man, divorced and robbed of his farm by a late-blooming real estate shark of an ex-wife, takes a road trip across America, armed with a childhood puzzle of the United States and 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-teacher days twenty-some years before, to a "snake...

Presents three novellas about humans and beasts, including "Westward Ho," "I Forgot to Go to Spain," and the title work in which a man near the end of his life becomes mindful of his own mortality while helping care for a younger man who suffered brain damage in a motorcycle accident.

Brown dog: A comic, near-mythological tale of a Michigan scoundrel, a freewheeling memoir of an ex-Bible student with criminal tendencies who loves to eat, drink, and chase women -- and his adventures with a submerged Indian chief. Sunset limited: Concerns a forty-one-yer-old mother of a teenage daughter who attempts to reconcile her sixties radical politics with growing older. The woman lit by fireflies: About death and transfiguration, baptism,...

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...

Jim Harrison's compelling and provocative Songs of Unreason explores what it means to inhabit the world in atavistic, primitive, and totemistic ways. "This can be disturbing to the learned," Harrison admits. Using interconnected suites, brief lyrics, and rollicking narratives, Harrison's passions and concerns --- creeks, thickets, time's effervescence, familial love -- emerge by turns painful and celebratory, localized and exiled.