Brautigan uses a journal format, with digressions galore, to explore the contingency of his own existence. He tells of loves past, homes past, the kitchens of friends and the beds of strangers. But like the old free-lovin' hippie he is, he never commits to any single story. Of one fellow he meets in Ketchikan: "He is one of those people who in a normal book, unfortunately not this one, would be developed into a memorable character." The author is forever warning you of a digression ahead or a story he'll get back to later. His references to the book in progress read, in this rueful context, not so much as self-indulgent cuteness, but as a kind of sad knowledge of the unkempt ways of his own mind. An Unfortunate Woman will not bring Brautigan many new fans, but devoted readers will find the dark, self-revealing side of a man who felt middle age like a blow to the head. --Claire Dederer

So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away is hugely underrated in the Brautigan canon. Although the story is set in the 1940s, the elegiac tone places the novel firmly within the context of the 1980s when it was first published. Brautigan took his own life two years after the novel's publication and the narrator's sense of alienation from modern America seems to mirror the way that his free-wheeling, free-associating sensibility had become hopelessly out of touch with the pervading culture of the time. But that is precisely why this small, beautifully sad novel is so important. Whereas in earlier works, Brautigan's characters viewed the world with child-like fascination and amusement, in So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away he reverses the process by examining a child's world through an adult's sad and diminishing gaze. It's a summation of all that Brautigan had previously achieved but in the harsher, colder climate of the late 20th century. --Jane Morris