Kirjahaku

An untrammeled renegade genius... Here is a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language.--Publishers Weekly Starred Review in Booklist: " C]hoices of poems from each of Harrison's books are passionate and sharp... Of special note is a section from Letters to Yesenin, a book-length poem, and the title poem from The Theory and Practice of Rivers , which contains these echoing lines, 'I forgot where I heard that poems / are designed to waken sleeping gods.' Reading this essential volume, one might imagine that the gods are, indeed, staying up late, reading lights on, turning the pages." Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems is distilled from fourteen volumes--from visionary lyrics and meditative suites to shape-shifting ghazals and prose-poem letters. Teeming throughout these pages are Harrison's legendary passions and appetites, his meditations, rages, and love-songs to the natural world. The New York Times concluded a review from early in Harrison's career with a provocative quote: "This is poetry worth loving, hating, and fighting over, a subjective mirror of our American days and needs." That sentiment still holds true, as Jim Harrison's essential poems continue to call for our fiercest attention. Also included are full-color images of poem drafts--both typescripts and holographs--as well as the letter Denise Levertov sent to publisher W.W. Norton in the early 1960s, advocating for Harrison's debut collection. In his essay Poetry as Survival, Jim Harrison wrote, Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak. The Essential Poems is proof positive that Jim Harrison taught his soul to speak. In this unforgiving literary moment, we must deal honestly with Harrison's] life and work, as they are inextricable in a way that is not true of other poets...These poems bear-crawl gorgeously after a genuine connection to being, thrashing in giant leaps through the underbrush to find consolation, purpose, and redemption. In his raw, original keening he ambushes moments of unimaginable beauty, one after another, line after line...The Essential Poems demonstrates perfectly why we should turn to Harrison again. He lived and breathed an American confrontation with the physical earth, married himself to a universe of bodies and stumps and birds, did not try to shuck his grotesque masculinity and stared hard with his one good eye (the left was blinded when he was seven) at the inescapable, beckoning finger of death. --Dean Kuipers, LitHub "The Essential Poems provides a good introduction--or reintroduction--to the work of this singular writer... these pieces illustrate Harrison's range and his ease with various formats, from lyric poems to meditative suites to prose poems. They also spotlight his deep, rugged kinship with rural landscapes and the natural world, where 'the cost of flight is landing.'" --The Washington Post Jim Harrison's latest collection, The Essential Poems, contains...engaging and enlightening poems that] should be taught, learned, and loved. Remember this.--New York Journal of Books Had he been a chef, all the other foodies would have talked about how Jim Harrison dealt with big flavors. In his poems, they're all there -- love and death, remorse and longing, the rocket contrails of living. There's not a lot of small talk in The Essential Poems... this book grabs you by the collar and tells you in eleven hundred ways to wake up.--John Freeman, Executive Editor, Recommended Reading from Lit Hub Staff Jim Harrison had an appetite. He devoured the natural world with gusto and wrote about it with wild energy and sweetly caustic wit...Harrison was also a prodigious poet, and this thoughtfully curated collection The Essential Poems] showcases him at his best. Like his fiction, the poems observe the collision between civilization and the wildness outside our cities; they act like geocaches both harrowing and beautiful... Organized chronologically, the material here becomes a time line distilling Harrison's signature concerns.--Alta It is hard-boiled poetry, some of the best of its kind, and one is not surprised to know that Harrison has written very tough novels... His poetic vision is at the heart of it all.--Harper's

The Complete Poems by Jim Harrison (1937-2016) is the definitive collection from one of America's iconic writers. Introduced by activist and naturalist writer Terry Tempest Williams, this tour de force contains every poem Harrison published over his fifty-year career and displays his wide range of poetic styles and forms. Here are the nature-based lyrics of his early work, the high-velocity ghazals, a harrowing prose-poem "correspondence" with a Russian suicide, the riverine suites, fearless meditations inspired by the Zen monk Crazy Cloud, and a joyous conversation in haiku-like gems with friend and fellow poet Ted Kooser. Weaving throughout these 1000 pages are Harrison's legendary passions and appetites, his love songs and lamentations, and a clarion call to pay attention to the life you are actually living. The Complete Poems confirms that Jim Harrison is a talented storyteller with a penetrating eye for details, or as Publishers Weeklycalled him, "an untrammeled renegade genius... a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."

Coca-Cola is a true American original and one of the world’s most recognized and popular American products. In The Coca-Cola Art of Jim Harrison, the artist traces his lifelong love affair with the Coca-Cola trademark that began during his childhood in rural South Carolina.Harrison enjoyed drinking the sweet and effervescent beverage, but he also was attracted to the Coca-Cola trademark that was blazoned on buildings and signs in his home town. After years of marveling at the work of local sign painter J. J. Cornforth, Harrison approached the seventy-year-old for a summer job. During several summers Cornforth taught Harrison the craft. When the young artist climbed atop the scaffold in the summer of 1952 to paint his first Coca-Cola sign, little did he know that he was launching a career as one of America’s foremost landscape artists. In 1975 Harrison created a painting of a country store that featured a fading Coca-Cola sign he and Cornforth had painted twenty years earlier. The painting, titled ""Disappearing America,"" was offered as one of the first limited-edition Coca-Cola collector prints for $40 by Frame House Gallery. All 1,500 copies sold out quickly, propelling him into the national spotlight through the publisher’s network of 600 dealers. Harrison soon became the undisputed leader in rural Americana art, with this and many of his other prints appreciating up to 3,000 percent of their original value.Since entering into a licensee relationship with the Coca-Cola Company in 1995, Harrison has continued developing limited-edition prints, including his popular annual Coca-Cola calendar. Not surprisingly, Harrison has become an avid collector of old Coca-Cola signs. His studio is lined with a vast array of this collection, which serves as inspiration for new works of art.

Here are twenty-five years of Harrison's essays and articles, from venues as diverse as Playboy and The Nation, Outside and the American Poetry Review. They explore the passions and concerns of a classic American writer: ice fishing and bar pool, nouvelle cuisine and night walks. "Somewhere in that big literary acreage staked out by Thoreau, Hemingway, and Hunter Thompson is a chunk of space for Jim Harrison" (Playboy).

The Road Home lies in the shadows of Manifest Destiny and Wounded Knee; it is etched into the landscape of an old man's memory and into the stubborn dreams of a young man's heart. In one of Jim Harrison's greatest works, five members of the Northridge family narrate the tangled epic of their history on the expanses of the Nebraska plains. They strive to understand their fates, to reconcile with demons of the past, to live in accordance with the land and to die with grace. As the family grapples with the mysterious forces that both pull them apart and draw them inextricably back together, they must come to term with life's greatest and hardest lessons: the deception of passion, the pain of love, the vitality of art, and the supplication to nature's generosity and fury.

An epic tale that pits a son against the legacy of his family's desecration of the earth, as well as his father's more personal violations, Jim Harrison's True North is a beautiful and moving novel that speaks to the territory in our hearts that calls us back to our roots. The scion of a family of wealthy timber barons, David Burkett has grown up with a malevolent father and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills. He and his sister Cynthia, a firecracker who scandalizes the family by taking up with the son of their half-Native American gardener, are mostly left to make their own way. As David comes into to adulthood enlightened by three unforgettably intoxicating women, he realizes he must come to terms with his forefathers' rapacious destruction of the wood of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as well as with the working people who made their wealth possible. With thirty years of searching for the truth of what his family has done while trying to make amends, David looks closely at the root of his father's evil--and threatens, like Icarus, to destroy himself.

?Among the most indelible American novelists of the last hundred years. . . . [Harrison] remains at the height of his powers.”?Dwight Garner, The New York Times?Trenchant and visionary.”?Ron Carlson, The New York Times Book ReviewA New York Times best-seller, enthusiastically received by critics and embraced by readers, The River Swimmer is Jim Harrison at his most memorable: two men, one young and one older, confronting inconvenient loves and the encroachment of urbanity on nature, written with freshness, abundant wit, and profound humanity. In ?The Land of Unlikeness,” 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 sweetheart, of his relationship with his estranged daughter, and of his own lost love of painting. In ?The River Swimmer,” Harrison ventures into the magical as an Upper Peninsula farm boy is irresistibly drawn to swimming as an escape, and sees otherworldly creatures in the water. 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 an exceptional reminder of why Jim Harrison is one of the most cherished and important writers at work today.?Two years have gone by since I first suggested to President Obama that he create a new Cabinet post, and appoint distinguished fiction writer Jim Harrison as secretary for quality of life. The president still has not responded to my suggestion. . . . [The River Swimmer] deepens and broadens [Harrison’s] already openhearted and smart-minded sense of the way we live now, and what we might do to improve it.”?Alan Cheuse, NPR

?What Harrison does on every page of Brown Dog is have fun . . . not simply for the sake of delight but because he believes delight is as close to sublimity as humans can get. . . . The great project of life, he reminds us, is to sit still long enough to appreciate it.” ?Anthony Doerr, The New York Times Book Review?Brown Dog is . . . an everyman on the most fundamental level . . . vividly, evocatively, alive. . . . These novellas read like a nuanced conversation between author and character. . . . Masterful.” ?David Ulin, Los Angeles TimesNew York Times best-selling author Jim Harrison is one of America’s most beloved writers. Of all his creations, Brown Dog has earned cult status with readers in the more than two decades since his first appearance, scrambling to stay out of jail after his salvage-diving operation uncovers the frozen body of an Indian man in the waters of Lake Superior. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, now in paperback, this book gathers together all the Brown Dog novellas, including one that has never been published.Brown Dog is a bawdy, reckless, down-on-his-luck Michigan Indian, a former pulp cutter who looks on work as something to do when he needs money, far inferior to the pleasures of fishing. Of course, the flip side of this is that he’s never far from catastrophe. Overindulging in food, drink, and women while just scraping by, B.D. meets a nubile archaeologist who presses him for the location of a sacred Native American burial ground; the ensuing flirtation with radicalization results in B.D. wandering Los Angeles in search of a stolen bearskin. When he returns home a little older and wiser, B.D. will seek out family and end up pining for the lesbian social worker who’s pushing him toward stability. The collection culminates with ?He Dog,” written for this book, which finds B.D. still marginally employed and 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, in search of an answer to the riddle of family and, perhaps, a chance at redemption.Witty and poignantly human, Brown Dog underscores Harrison’s place as one of America’s most irrepressible writers, and one of our finest practitioners of the novella form. It is the ideal introduction (or reintroduction) to Harrison’s irresistible everyman.

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.

"Harrison's writing is always exhilarating. An added strength is his penchant for delightfully flawed but deeply human characters. Sunderson doesn't disappoint."--Seattle Times "The pleasures of The Big Seven are found most often in Sunderson's troubled, heavily marinated meditations ...Such is Harrison's gift for conveying human consciousness and all its vexing diversions and understatements and circular thoughts."--New York Times Book Review A national bestseller from one of our most renowned and popular authors, The Big Seven finds Detective Sunderson settling into a hunting cabin in a remote area of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where he soon realizes that his neighbors may be as dangerous as any maniac he faced in his cop days. 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 greater, more expansive evil of his neighbor. "Harrison is an old master, here on top of his game ...Harrison is maybe a little bit like ...Elmore Leonard (to whom Sunderson pays tribute), in that both write prose, easy on the eye, that seems so natural as to be effortless. That kind of writing is, of course, anything but effortless--it takes genius, but mostly experience, intuition and discipline. And a somewhat raffish charm, like Harrison's, doesn't hurt."--The Cleveland Plain Dealer "Whimsical and bawdy fun ...Harrison writes beautifully about fishing and the outdoors."--Washington Post

New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison was one of America's most beloved and critically acclaimed writers. The classic Legends of the Fall is Harrison at his most memorable: a striking collection of novellas written with exceptional brilliance and a ferocious love of life. The title novella, "Legends of the Fall"--which was made into the film of the same name--is an epic, moving tale of three brothers fighting for justice in a world gone mad. Moving from the raw landscape of early twentieth-century Montana to the blood-drenched European battlefields of World War I and back again to Montana, Harrison's powerful story explores the theme of revenge and the actions to which people resort when their lives or goals are threatened, painting an unforgettable portrait of the twentieth-century man. Also including the novellas "Revenge" and "The Man Who Gave Up His Name," Legends of the Fall confirms Jim Harrison's reputation as one of the finest American voices of his generation.

A New York Times bestseller, The Ancient Minstrel is a stunning collection of novellas that highlight Jim Harrison's 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 indulges his lifelong dream of raising pigs, struggles to write the "big novel" he's rashly promised his editor, and attempts to rekindle the long marriage that has sustained him. In Eggs, a Montana woman recalls a life spent collecting eggs--at her grandparents' farm in Montana and near Dorset, England, where she ends up during World War II. Eggs of a different sort preoccupy her when, unmarried but undeterred, she decides to try to have a baby. And in The Case of the Howling Buddhas, retired Detective Sunderson 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 and entertaining, with moments of both profound wisdom and sublime humor, The Ancient Minstrel is an exceptional reminder of why Harrison was one of our most beloved and critically acclaimed writers.

"[A] culinary combo plate of Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Julian Schnabel, and Sam Peckinpah . . . Harrison writes with enough force to make your knees buckle and with infectious zeal that makes you turn the pages hungry for more . . . Jim Harrison has staked out a distinctive place in the world of food writing."--Jane and Michael Stern, New York Times Book Review on The Raw and the CookedNew York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison was one of this country's most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. He also wrote some of the best essays on food around, earning praise as "the poet laureate of appetite" (Dallas Morning News). A Really Big Lunch, to be published on the one-year anniversary of Harrison's death, collects many of his food pieces for the first time--and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve. Jim Harrison's legendary gourmandise is on full display in A Really Big Lunch. From the titular New Yorker piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from Brick, Playboy, Kermit Lynch Newsletter, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews, A Really Big Lunch is shot through with Harrison's pointed apercus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison's life over the last three decades. A Really Big Lunch is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite. "Harrison is the American Rabelais, and he is at his irreverent and excessive best in this collection." --John Skowles, San Diego Union-Tribune on The Raw and the Cooked

"A Really Big Lunch showcases Harrison's enthusiastic, funny, and uncompromising views on how to eat, drink, and live well . . . His writing is bodily, bawdy, sharp. The more we have of his voice, the better."--Boston GlobeA national bestseller and an Amazon Best Book of the Month in the Cookbook/Food & Wine category, now in paperback, A Really Big Lunch collects many of New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison's essays on food for the first time--and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve. In these pieces, Harrison muses on the relationship between hunter and prey, interrogates the obscure language of wine reviews, and delivers a manifesto against the bland, mass-produced food of our time, proposing instead what he calls the Vivid Diet. He delights in food from the most outre indulgence (a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses) to a simple bowl of menudo. Harrison's food writing is a program for living, and A Really Big Lunch is shot through with his pointed apercus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison's life over the last fifteen years. Lovingly introduced by master chef Mario Batali, A Really Big Lunch is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite."The collection is chockablock with . . . zingers as well as plenty of half-baked, hilarious theories you can ponder while planning your first summer barbecue."--The Paris Review

The New York Times bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry?including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth?Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. Praised as ?a raunchy, funny, swaggering, angry, cocksure book.” (The New York Times Book Review), 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 find this in print once again, and for new readers, this work serves as the perfect introduction to Harrison’s remarkable insight, storytelling, and evocation of the natural world.

“Mr. Harrison’s perceptions are jagged and cutting . . . a remarkably well-plotted story.”—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York TimesThe New York Times bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth—Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. His novel A Good Day to Die centers on an unlikely trio: a poet with a tendency to lapse into beatific reveries of superb fishing in cold, fast streams; a Vietnam vet consumed by uppers, downers, and violence; and a girl who loved only one of them—at first. With plans conceived during the madness of one long drunken night, the three of them leave Florida, driving west to buy a case of dynamite, determined to save the Grand Canyon from a dam they believe is about to be built. A Good Day to Die is an unrelenting tour de force, and a dark exploration of what it means to live beyond the pale in contemporary America. Returning Harrison fans will be ecstatic to find this in print once again, and for new readers, this work serves as the perfect introduction to Harrison’s remarkable insight, storytelling, and evocation of the natural world.

The New York Times bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry?including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth?Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. In Farmer, he tells the story of Joseph, a forty-three-year-old farmer-schoolteacher who suddenly finds himself at a crossroads. Forced to choose between two lovers?one a younger woman, the other his beautiful childhood friend?he must also decide whether or not to stay on the farm or finally seek the wider, more broader horizons he has avoided all his life. Returning Harrison fans will be ecstatic to find this in print once again, and for new readers, this work serves as the perfect introduction to Harrison’s remarkable insight, storytelling, 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 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.

Filled with passion and humor, a much-anticipated collection of enthusiastic writings from the beloved writer and food critic includes his Smart and Esquire columns, correspondence with French gourmet Gerard Oberle, and pieces on food in France and America for Men's Journal. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.