Richard Brautigan

Yep, Kafka still on for this Sunday.  See ya at 7 PM sharp!

December selection: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar, two novellas and poetry available in one volume, ISBN 9780395500767.  I've only read In Watermelon Sugar, which I think is an incredible piece of outsider literature with a distinctly bizarre American feel, simultaneously a product of its era and yet disembodied and idiosyncratic--"good for the soul" (sez the shelf talker).  I'm looking forward to discussing everything in this volume, but if you've only got time for one thing, Trout Fishing will probably be more than enough fodder for two hours' discussion.

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.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780395500767