Click on the covers for more information on the different editions, including their availability. If you cannot view the image, download the most recent version of Flash Player Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, In Watermelon Sugar by Keith Maillard? Well, the Delacorte Press has put Brautigan's three paperbacks into a hard back, tacked the exorbitant price of $6.96 on it, and, without much effort at all (the hard back is an exact reproduction of the paperbacks, all the way to the covers) have made themselves an easy buck. It's a pretty edition if you're into laying out that much money for a book; if you've got light fingers, it's worth picking up. Brautigan's stuff bears reading over and over again; the hardcover edition will stand up to that. Brautigan's poetry ("THE PILL," etc) is in the Imagist tradition and is as good as the best in that tradition. He hasn't got a single hang up with "poetic diction" left, builds his short, hard poems out of everyday speech. It's harder than it looks to do this sort of thing, let down the tension of eye heart brain for a moment and it goes soft and flaccid. But Brautigan never falters. God knows what they'd tell us in some English department about him, but fuck that, he's good. This is my favorite: The Quail There are three quail in a cage next door, and they are the sweet delight of our mornings, calling to us like small frosted cakes: bobwhitebobwhitebobwhite, but at night they drive our God-damn Jake crazy. They run around that cage like pinballs as he stands out there, smelling their asses through the wire. TROUT FISHING is a collection, or collage maybe, of little stories and anecdotes. There is damn little precedent for what he's doing here, a mood a little like Thurber, a style a little like the nutty old German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters?. Each piece ends with a spark, like the charged ending of a haiku or a good joke, a kick in the brain. When I read Trout Fishing, I laughed a lot. I've got to resist the temptation to call WATERMELON SUGAR a vision of an anarchist utopia, or an allegory. It's not like anything at all. It's a wonderful story, stayed in my head for weeks after I read it. In the Boston Globe of a month or so ago I saw a review of Watermelon Sugar laid out by some ass hole English professor. He put down Brautigan for being "sentimental." Shit. Sure he's sentimental. So what? When I have kids, I'll read Watermelon Sugar before they go to sleep at night. Broadside/Free Press? April 22, 1970: 8

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