Willard and His Bowling Trophies — Richard Brautigan

Brautigan was in many ways the Hemingway of the 60s--but a Hemingway with a playful sense of humor. His epigrammatic stories and poems are clean and simple, but like a pool of quiet water, sometimes deceptively deep; the individual parts of each of his books are short, but linger in your imagination for a long time like the flavor of the best chocolate envelops your palette; and his subjects are mundane and even naively treated, but sometimes touch on the profound.

I loved Brautigan's writing as a teenager, hated his writing when I was a snobby East coast academic--but find that I am once again attracted to his work. Perhaps this change of opinion occurred because I have spent so much time in his stomping grounds in the Pacific Northwest in the past years, or perhaps my transient dislike for his writing arose out of his ability to delicately punch holes in pompous pretense. At any rate, if you haven't read Brautigan yet, you might give him a try--and if you are already a fan of his, you should rejoice at these recent reissues of all his major works.