Most Popular Books by JIM HARRISON

Starred Review from Booklist: "This robust volume is a testament to the fortitude of a great American poet''s work... [a] landmark collection." From the Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams: "Jim Harrison...was among the great ones—an elevated soul in all his unruliness who favored his senses and courted the wild on the page and in the world. His was a storied life that loomed large, and we are the beneficiaries. ''Such a powerful wounded poet—wrote as if he had to sing with a cut throat . . . and he did have to sing,'' said Jorie Graham." Jim Harrison: Complete Poems 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tour de force contains every poem Harrison published over his fifty-year career, as well as a section of previously unpublished "Last Poems." 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. Jim Harrison: 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.” NOTE:Jim Harrison: Complete Poems also appears as a three-volume box set. Print run limited to 750 copies. Each volume is introduced by a different writer: Colum McCann, Joy Williams, and John Freeman. The box set retails for $85 and ISBN is 9781556596414.

"A sensitive, powerful love story about a man on the cutting edge of life." —Richard Brautigan In Farmer, Jim Harrison 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 tantalizing young student, the other his beautiful childhood friend he must also decide whether or not to stay on the farm or finally seek the wider, more worldly horizons he has avoided all his life. Farmer is a wondrous blend of insight, storytelling, and the author''s uncanny ability to evoke the mysteries and beauties of the natural world. "A beautiful novel", Farmer serves as the perfect introduction to Harrison''s remarkable insight, storytelling, and evocation of the natural world ( The Boston Globe). "A quiet triumph . . . Yes, it is the old story again. Taking it and making it new, as Harrison has done, is a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes. But then so are all good novels." — The Washington Post

From the New York Times–bestselling author of Legends of the Fall: a beautifully crafted story of one woman''s journey to find her son. From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam—and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul. One of Harrison''s most ambitious novels, Dalva explores an extraordinary family through the strong, engaging voice of an unforgettable woman, confirming Harrison as one of America''s most memorable writers. "There is no putting aside Dalva until the time bombs go off, the identities are revealed, and the skeletons almost literally tumble from the closets . . . Dalva is suspended in its own beauty." —Louise Erdrich, Chicago Tribune

Two outstanding late novellas from one of America''s most beloved and critically acclaimed authors. A brilliant rendering of two men striving to find their way in the world, written with freshness, abundant wit, and profound humanity, The River Swimmer is Jim Harrison at his most memorable. 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 Water Baby, 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 remains one of America''s most cherished and important writers, on a par with such literary greats as Richard Ford, Anne Tyler, Robert Stone, Russell Banks, and Ann Beattie. "Trenchant and visionary . . . Harrison is a writer of the body, which he celebrates as the ordinary, essential and wondrous instrument by which we measure the world. Without it, there is no philosophy. And with it, of course, philosophy can be a rocky test. . . . I could feel Jim Harrison grinning . . . in his glorious novella The River Swimmer." — The New York Times Book Review

Sergei Yesenin was a Russian poet who, in 1925, hanged himself after writing his farewell poem in blood. Jim Harrison''s "correspondence" with Yesenin is an American masterwork. In the early 1970s, Harrison was living in poverty on a hard-scrabble farm, suffering from depression and suicidal urges. He began to write daily prose-poem letters to Yesenin, confiding to his unlikely friend about sex, drunkenness, family, politics - about living for another day. Although "the rope" remained ever present, Harrison listened to his poems: "My year-old daughter''s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop."

Jim Harrison''s essays and articles have been selected from twenty-five years of work, from venues as diverse as PLAYBOY, 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.

Named to the Notable Books of the Year lists from The Kansas City Star and the Michigan Library Association. “Jim Harrison is a writer with immortality in him.”—The Times (London) “This is [Harrison’s] most robust, sure-footed, and blood-raising poetry collection to date.”—Booklist Jim Harrison—one of America’s most beloved writers—calls his poetry “the true bones of my life.” Although he is best known as a fiction writer, it is as a poet that Publishers Weekly famously called him an “untrammeled renegade genius.” Saving Daylight, Harrison’s tenth collection of poetry, is his first book of new poems in a decade. All of Harrison’s abundant passions for life are poured into suites, prose poems, letter-poems, and even lyrics for a mariachi band. The subjects and concerns are wide-ranging—from the heart-rending “Livingston Suite,” where a boy drowns in the local river and the body is discovered by the poet’s wife—to some of the most harrowing political poems of Harrison’s career. There is also a cast of creature characters—bears, dogs, birds, fish—as well as the woodlands, thickets, and occasional cities of Arizona, Montana, Michigan, France, and Mexico. “Imagination is my only possession,” Harrison once said. And Saving Daylight is an imagination in full, exuberant bloom. Jim Harrison is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His work has been translated into dozens of languages. Born and raised in Michigan, he now lives in Montana and Arizona.

Jim Harrison''s first novel—a walk on the wild side from "a force of nature in American letters" ( The Seattle Times). The New York Times–bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, nonfiction, 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," Wolf tells the story of a man who abandons Manhattan after too many nameless women and drunken nights, to roam the wilderness of northern Michigan, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the rare wolves that prowl that territory ( The New York Times Book Review). "When you turn the last page and Swanson''s voice stops, you want to flip back and keep listening." — The Examiner

Harrison, one of America''s most celebrated writers, is considered "a renegade genius" for his poetry.

Three novellas explore the theme of revenge and the actions to which people resort when they feel threatened

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. Brown Dog gathers all the Brown Dog novellas, including one never-published one, 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.

Three classic novellas from "one of our master chroniclers of human hungers, flaws, and frustrations." ( The Kansas City Star). Jim Harrison''s vivid, tender, and deeply felt fictions have won him acclaim as an American master of the novella. His highly acclaimed volume of novellas, The Summer He Didn''t Die, is a sparkling and exuberant collection about love, the senses, and family, no matter how untraditional. In the title novella, Brown Dog, a hapless Michigan Indian, is trying to parent his two stepchildren and take care of his family''s health on meager resources. (It helps a bit that his charms are irresistible to the new dentist in town.) Republican Wives is a wicked satire on the sexual neuroses of the right, the emptiness of a life lived for the status quo, and the irrational power of love that, when thwarted, can turn so easily into an urge to murder. And Tracking is a meditation on Harrison''s fascination with place, telling his own familiar mythology through the places his life has seen and the intellectual loves he has known. With wit as sharp and prose as lush as any Harrison has yet written, The Summer He Didn''t Die is a resonant, warm, and joyful ode to our journey on this earth. "Harrison has proved to be one of our finest storytellers. These novellas are urgent and contemporary, displaying his marvelous gifts for compression and idiosyncratic language." — Los Angeles Times

The first-ever collection of interviews with this well-known, prolific writer whose books include twenty-two volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction published over a period of thirty-six years

A road trip novel of three desperate souls fueled by drugs, alcohol, and delusions—from the New York Times–bestselling author of Legends of the Fall. The author of thirty-nine books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, 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. "Mr. Harrison''s perceptions are jagged and cutting . . . A remarkably well-plotted story." —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

In three novellas, Jim Harrison takes us on an American journey as he leads us through the wondrous landscape of the human heart. In this "richly allusive and wickedly funny" collection, Jim Harrison offers "three delightful studies of unique individuals battling inventively against society''s demands for conformity" ( Library Journal). Julip follows a bright and resourceful young woman as she tries to spring her brother from a Florida jail—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 10 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. In each of these stories, the irresistible pull of nature becomes a magnificent backdrop for exploring the toughest questions about life and love.

Jim Harrison’s The Theory and Practice of Rivers returns to print as a celebratory, stand-alone volume. In her heartfelt and powerful introduction, Rebecca Solnit calls this collection both an elegy, inspired by the death of Harrison’s teenage niece, and a “loose memoir” teeming with thoughts and images that leap intuitively across subjects, recalling myriad experiences, places, and encounters. A handwritten draft of the title poem, retrieved from Harrison’s extensive literary archive, provides a rare and intimate window into his surging creative process. As Outside magazine puts it, The Theory and Practice of Rivers is filled with “moving water, the search for consolation and meaning in the sublime rightness of wild landscape.” This contemporary classic speaks to the rivers and cascades in all of us, the ceaseless motion by which our lives are determined.

"Harrison''s poems succeed on the basis of an open heart and a still-ravenous appetite for life."—The Texas Observer The title Dead Man''s Float is inspired by a technique used by swimmers to conserve energy when exhausted, to rest up for the long swim to shore. In his fourteenth volume of poetry, Jim Harrison presents keen awareness of physical pains, delights in the natural world, and reflects on humanity''s tentative place in a universe filled with ninety billion galaxies. By turns mournful and celebratory, these fearless and exuberant poems accomplish what Harrison''s poems always do: wake us up to the possibilities of being fully alive. "Forthright and unaffected, even brash, Harrison always scoops us straight into the world whether writing fiction or nonfiction. This new collection [Dead Man''s Float] takes its cue from a technique swimmers use to conserve energy in deep water, and Harrison goes in deep, acknowledging our frailness even as he seamlessly connects with a world that moves from water to air to the sky beyond."—Library Journal “Harrison pours himself into everything he writes… in poems, you do meet Harrison head-on. As he navigates his seventies, he continues to marvel with succinct awe and earthy lyricism over the wonders of birds, dogs, and stars as he pays haunting homage to his dead and contends with age’s assaults. The sagely mischievous poet of the North Woods and the Arizona desert laughs at himself as he tries to relax by imagining that he’s doing the dead man’s float only to sink into troubling memories…Bracingly candid, gracefully elegiac, tough, and passionate, Harrison travels the deep river of the spirit, from the wailing precincts of a hospital to a “green glade of soft marsh grass near a pool in a creek” to the moon-bright sea.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist "Harrison doesn''t write like anyone else, relying entirely on the toughness of his vision and intensity of feeling."—Publishers Weekly Warbler This year we have two gorgeous yellow warblers nesting in the honeysuckle bush. The other day I stuck my head in the bush. The nestlings weigh one twentieth of an ounce, about the size of a honeybee. We stared at each other, startled by our existence. In a month or so, when they reach the size of bumblebees they''ll fly to Costa Rica without a map. Jim Harrison, one of America''s most versatile and celebrated writers, is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—including Legends of the Fall, the acclaimed trilogy of novellas. With a fondness for open space and anonymous thickets, he divides his time between Montana and southern Arizona.

From the New York Times–bestselling author of Legends of the Fall: "Harrison spins the common chaff of a road trip into gold" ( Tim McNulty, The 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, divorced and robbed of his farm by a late-blooming real estate shark of an ex-wife, on a road trip across America. Cliff is armed with a childhood puzzle of the United States and a mission to rename all the states and state birds, the latter of which have been unjustly saddled with white men''s banal monikers up until now. His adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student from his high-school-teacher 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 who has just bought an apartment over the Presidio in San Francisco. Jim Harrison''s riotous and moving cross-country novel, The English Major, is the map of a man''s journey into, and out of, himself. It is vintage Harrison—reflective, big-picture American, and replete with wicked wit. " The English Major is to midlife crisis what The Catcher in the Rye is to adolescence." —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

The story of how a summer job spawned a long and rewarding career as an artist 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.