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Trout Fishing in America

3.85 of 5 stars 3.85 · rating details · 4,671 ratings · 277 reviews

Richard Brautigan was a literary idol of the 1960s and 1970s whose comic genius and iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imagination of young people everywhere. He came of age during the Haight-Ashbury period and has been called “the last of the Beats.” His early books became required reading for the hip generation, and on its publication Trout Fishing in Americ...more

Paperback, 144 pages

Published January 19th 2010 by Mariner Books (first published October 12th 1967)

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Apr 25, 2013 Hadrian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, humor-and-satire, short-stories, american

Trout Fishing in America is a book about 'half-assed trees', dogs so old they looked stuffed, and men who sell creeks by the yard. Trout Fishing in America is about outhouses, appliances in the woods, and bookstore owners who can tell your future by the type of sex you had with the woman upstairs.

Trout Fishing in America is about little boys named Trout Fishing in America, who write Trout Fishing in America in chalk on the backs of first-graders, trout fishing, and doctors who live in the deep w...more

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May 14, 2013 Erik Graff rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Americans

Recommended to Erik by: Tom Kosinski

Shelves: literature

Although my life was not very pleasant from the time of moving to Park Ridge in fifth grade until the beginning of high school, things began to pick up by the sophomore year. I joined the Social Science Society at school,a club dominated by older students who were predominately bookish and left-leaning. I made my first real friends, Rich Hyde and Hank Kupjack, both of whom also belonged to Tri-S.

Things got even better by the junior and senior years. It was the end of the sixties and what had hap...more Although my life was not very pleasant from the time of moving to Park Ridge in fifth grade until the beginning of high school, things began to pick up by the sophomore year. I joined the Social Science Society at school,a club dominated by older students who were predominately bookish and left-leaning. I made my first real friends, Rich Hyde and Hank Kupjack, both of whom also belonged to Tri-S.

Things got even better by the junior and senior years. It was the end of the sixties and what had happened on the coasts years before was beginning to penetrate the Chicago suburbs. We were a minority to be sure, but Maine South with over four thousand students, a minority can be pretty large.

The suburban counterculture was seen as comprising three overlapping groups. All thought of themselves as different and most felt some kinship, if not identification, with the others. The largest group, numerically speaking, were those who took illegal drugs and weren't ashamed of the practice. Indeed, some were quite knowledgeable, quite serious. Virtually no one took dangerous or addictive drugs. Pot and the hallucinagons were the substances of choice. Although there were a few drinkers, we probably drank a lot less than average students or the generations before or after ours. Drink was not serious. A second group may have been peculiar to our town. It was the earliest that had a self-professed identity. They called themselves, among other things, "the Meek" and had a particular interest in the arts. Naturally, the arts they publicly identified with were not those normally judged to be fine arts, but rather performance works which they did themselves, shows that they put on themselves, books by authors out of the mainstream, experimental stuff, cutting-edge stuff. I made a lot of friends in that group, a couple of them being the first self-professed homosexuals I'd ever met. The third group were the politicals. Although most of us, for this was my primary self-definition, were at least "informed by Marxism", and almost all were students very interested in and sympathetic to what the general society would have called "leftist", a couple of "us" were actually libertarians of one sort or another. The decisive thing, other than personality, was being radical, questioning the status quo.

Now-a-days, and even then if one relied on Life Magazine for information, people think the sixties counterculture was physically identifiable by hairstyle and clothing. This was certainly not the case with us. I probably got my first bellbottoms after Dad did in the seventies. Likewise, few guys had long hair until it became fashionable. If anything, we just worried less about how we looked and resented the tyranny of fashion (or, to we in the third group, "commodity fetishism").

So, who did we read back then? The books that circulated widely among my friends, the books I read because my friends recommended them, were by such as Herman Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Leonard Cohen, Peter Ginsberg, Hunter Thompson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Timothy Leary, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Paramahansa Yogananda, Mohandas Gandhi, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Lily and, of course, Richard Brautigan.

Tom Kosinski was the one who recommended Brautigan as I recall, but if it hadn't been him it would have been another, so popular was the author in our circles. And why? Well, generally he's very, very funny. He even looked funny, especially considering that he was a grown man. He smoked pot. He celebrated the odd ball, the eccentric, the ones rejected by or rejecting of normative culture. I loved him and read one of his books after another.

At his best, still now, the Kosinski reminds me of him.(less)

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Sep 04, 2007 Mark rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

It may not be fair to say this without revisiting Brautigan, but I'd be willing to bet my home on the notion that he was truly a 60s phenomenon and not a truly significant talent. And I am a child of the 60s. I don't remember a single thing from this, btw.

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May 03, 2011 robert rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Richard Brautigan is the favorite author of a woman I loved and finally after years I have read him. I appreciate his short story 1/3 1/3 1/3 and his poem Machines of Loving Grace. I honor him for enduring for years the deep sorrow that eventually caused him to take his own life. But regretfully I ask: what the hell is this? Local color? An attempt at humor ("you had to be a plumber to fish that creek")? Is it supposed to be friendly and accessible like Rod McKuen("next year somebody else will h...more

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Aug 06, 2007 Dan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Richard Brautigan's easy-going, beyond informal style should be the easiest thing in the world for today's internet-saavy to read - the freestyle association, onomatopoeia, and occasional anthropomorphism fits right in with any lolcats-humorist. In his most famous work, Brautigan fires off tiny snippets of genius with Trout Fishing in America inserted as whatever concept or person he focuses on. Occasionally, he ties some of the concepts together on a whim. Amidst all this very 60's attitude and...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Taylor rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, fiction, own, wheres-the-bar

Finished this a few weeks ago, and would have much sooner, but I actually stopped reading it for a week 10 pages from the end, because I really wanted it to linger, though the good news is that it's short enough that I will probably reread it sooner/more frequently than some of my other favorites.

The kind of book that I loved without entirely knowing why, but a few highlights:
--Brautigan is from Tacoma, Washington, and I am from Washington, and started this on my way back from my vacation there,...more

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Jan 25, 2012 Paul rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american-novels

Short and completely off the wall; published in 1967 and immediately a success with the counterculture. The favourite book of a number of ageing hippies I have known!
It has been compared to Kerouac and Burroughs, but I think that is mistaken; it is a different type of approach to the world. The chapters are short and informal. Trout Fishing in America appears as a person/persons throughout and has spawned at last one modern band and several sets of parenst naming their unfortunate offspring Tro...more

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Jan 18, 2012 Kirstie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Similar to In Watermelon Sugar, after a while I will admit I got a little sick of hearing about trout in this one. Other than that, there are again some great insights here and again it made me think of some of the more recent Tao Lin novels I've read. It is interesting how trout, trout fishing, and trout fishing in America becomes a sort of malleable metaphor. Again, very sad and poetic stuff...and quite a short one but some of these ideas in short snippets of prose certainly stay with you.

Favo...more

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May 18, 2011 Dan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: to-finish

I want to buy this book. In fact, I'm definitely going to buy this book. I started reading some of the poems standing up in a book store after I ate a bagel and drank a cup of hot tea in a bagel store called Bagelsmith.

One of the poems was about Brautigan being the poet in residence at a certain university. It sounded like his residency consisted of hanging out, thinking, and inwardly making fun of the professors who worked at the college. Damn, that's a sweet situation! I need to get that going...more I want to buy this book. In fact, I'm definitely going to buy this book. I started reading some of the poems standing up in a book store after I ate a bagel and drank a cup of hot tea in a bagel store called Bagelsmith.

One of the poems was about Brautigan being the poet in residence at a certain university. It sounded like his residency consisted of hanging out, thinking, and inwardly making fun of the professors who worked at the college. Damn, that's a sweet situation! I need to get that going for myself. Reading this book made me want to speed up time so I could be a weathered, whimsical old poet with lots of life experience. If someone gave me a chart with specific information on how to make my life as spontaneous and daring as Brautigan's probably was, I would follow it to the T. Right now I'm typing on my laptop lying in a prone position with my laptop on my stomach and my neck bent at a 90 degree angle to see the screen. There's no pillowcase on my pillow, no mattress cover on my mattress. I just made beans and rice and didn't use enough spices. Would Brautigan have done this?

I probably would have stood in the store trying to read as many poems as possible if I hadn't already confirmed to myself that I was definitely going to buy the book. The moment that I absolutely decided to buy this book was when I turned it over to read the blurb and there was no blurb, just the word "Mayonnaise" over a bright red background. It took me off guard and I laughed audibly. I bet Brautigan devised the back cover and has some kind of contract that says publishers have to include it on all subsequent pressings of the book.

I want to buy this book more than I want to read it. I'll carry it around in my messenger bag pressed against a Moleskin. My messenger bag is not really a messenger bag; it's more like a briefcase. I found it hanging on a wrought iron fence, hanging from one of the points. It's not garbage, though. I can tell the original owner took it right out of their clean house and hung it there. It's top notch. Italian leather. Although there was an old tube of chapstick in one of the pockets, which was kind of weird. I threw it out. I left the briefcase on my bed once and my cat scratched the fuck out of it. It's cool, though; I shoe-polished the scratches and you can barely tell.

I'm going to carry this book around and read it in increments in various locales in New York City. I'll read it on the subway, that's a given. I'll probably read it at dusk on a Friday night before I go to meet some friends at a bar. Maybe I'll even read it standing on a street corner under a street light, leaning on a mailbox as I wait for a friend to meet me, perhaps my friend Bo. Then after having a drink or two with some friends I'll leave early and walk out into the open air to read this book by myself. Maybe I'll walk up to the park to find a large stone to sit on.(less)

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Oct 14, 2012 A.M. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012-challenge-list, literary-fiction

I think the best way to approach Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America is to see it as a scrapbook - a collection of literary vignettes - as opposed to a "novel." For it's not a novel, at least not in any conventional manner. It is actually highly non-conventional, and that is what I like about it - and about Brautigan.

Trout Fishing in American is not simply the title of this work; it is also a character in itself - an object, a place, a subject, an event, a scene. Trout Fishing in America is the...more

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May 01, 2012 Ed rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, poetry

I gotta read more Brautigan. I pretty sure I don't always get his drift, but he writes the most entertaining (and sometimes the most illuminatingly nutty) analogies. Check this one out:

"I believe I saw a woodcock. He had a long bill like putting a fire hydrant into a pencil sharpener, then pasting it on to a bird and letting the bird fly away in front of me with this thing on its face for no other purpose than to amaze me."

I especially liked his synaesthetic analogies, which he used quite a lot...more

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May 10, 2013 Mark Glover rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I discovered Richard Brautigan in the darks recesses of the university library while trying to hide from a sociology essay. While I don't remember much of the essays content or my own standpoint on the subject, I did develop a greater appreciation for the works of Mr Brautigan.Having read a number of his works(well all that I could get my hands on really) its hard to understand why he didn't recieve the same level of acclaim as his peers. He is often grouped in with the beat writers which in its...more

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Aug 27, 2011 Anna O'connell rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Everything by Richard Brautigan is incredible and amazing to read. I would recommend it to anyone and do recommend it to everyone. His style is unique and he has such an authentic but fantastical tone to his short stories, poetry, and novellas. He is the only author from whom I have actually gotten excited about reading multiple works. Brautigan apparently fathered the literary beatnik and hippie generations, so his texts tend to reflect those points of view. This book in particular doesn't have...more

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Apr 22, 2012 Annie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I need to dig up some old reviews of "Trout Fishing in America," because it would be interesting to see how critics responded to this book. Frankly, it may be impossible to critique. It's not a novel, it's not a series of short stories, it's not poetry. It's more like an experience. It's a stream of words, and you have to let yourself get swept along with them.

It reminds me of standing in front of a Pollack painting, and finding myself reacting emotionally without quite knowing what I was looki...more

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Dec 29, 2011 Elisa Berry rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Having named the new addition Trout, aka Trout Canus, Trout Fishing the Return, I sat this morning, after a good dog walk down a creek bed, and re-read this tiny tome. Brautigan's novel, like a little dog with a big name, is a mighty gift in a tiny package.

If TFA is a farewell to the pastoral Pacific Northwest, and to a larger degree a eulogy to yet another golden era in America, then my naming of this little dog seems fitting. He is a return of something lost, or at least set aside for awhile-...more

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Aug 14, 2009 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2009

This is the first time I've met Trout Fishing in America. And although I fished almost everyday in my youth and caught hundreds of Trout, I never realized that the guy with me was Trout Fishing in America. We'd always stop at Ledet's Supermarket and buy bread, ham, and a small jar of mayonnaise on our way to the trout rooms. We'd sit in our small boat with corks bobbing in the room and eat ham sandwiches. We'd look at the sky and see rabbits, angels, or toaster ovens in the clouds. And we'd appr...more

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Dec 18, 2009 Ben Loory rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

richard brautigan is probably my favorite person in the world. which i suppose is kind of sad, because he's not in it anymore. this book is great, and very, very funny. his metaphors and one-liners are i think at an all-time high here. i don't like it as much as The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western because it's still pretty fragmented, and not as much as the stories in Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 because the chapters aren't emotionally affecting for the most part. the book is primar...more

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Feb 02, 2012 Kyle rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, literary-fiction, san-francisco, sixties, absurd, meta

1967. This book rocks out. It is occasionally about trout fishing in America, but mostly not. It reminds me of Donald Barthelme a little. Perhaps a little drug-inspired. It hasn't got a plot; it's more like a string of episodes in the mind of someone who has done too much LSD. If you could bring that unhinged LSD feeling of knowing and understanding everything, but kind of not being able to quite put your finger on it, or explain it, it's kind of like that. It's a nirvana-inducing book. It unhin...more

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Feb 20, 2009 Caris rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009

A little like Vonnegut. A little like Bukowski. Beautifully simplistic. It was lovely to read. There were some really strange ideas and images as well as some genuinely profound thoughts. I especially liked the chapter where a guy was selling trout streams by the foot. He just had piles of them out back. Superficially, I think this might be a criticism of man's domination of nature, but I think there's more to it. Something about signs and babies and trout fishing and hitchhiking and names. Brau...more

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Dec 14, 2009 Dan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud in public at a book the way I did at this one. Whether you call it a short-story collection or a novel or a rant, Trout Fishing In America is a wholly original work of ingenious nonsense and stupid profundity, reminiscent at points of a koan conveyed by a drunken sage, except with a setting along the banks of various trout streams across America instead of somewhere in China or Japan, and of course substituting the unfiltered sake for high powere...more

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Jun 25, 2012 Christa Hartsock rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

At first I was frustrated by the forward, and how the writer seemed to deem it necessary to forgive the book its faults--a "you'd understand if you had been there!" sort of apology--before the first word was laid. I was then frustrated as the book illustrated exactly why that forward must have seemed necessary: what separates these wandering, whimsical stories from any other similar volumes that have popped up in its wake?

I'm still not enthralled with the book, but when I stopped caring about t...more

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Oct 27, 2012 Steven Pilling rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Never read another book like this one.

This was a recomendation from a friend when we were reading 100 yeard old man and i can see why she mentioned it.

The book is by turns funny, confusing, smart and occasionally uses language that shows its age (it was written in the year i was born).

There are moments that seem so self-indulgent but it doesnt seem to matter he is interesting and once you read with his voice its remarkable and enjoyable. If you find a chapter you are not enjoying dont worry you...more

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May 14, 2012 Mahmood666 rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

این کتاب اونقدر بهم برای خوندن پیشنهاد شده بود که خودم نخونده این کتاب رو به خیلی آدما پیشنهاد میدادم ولی وقتی خودم کتاب رو شروع کردم شوکه شدم.من کتاب زیاد میخونم و هر جور کتابی رو تجربه کردم اما این هر چیزی بود یه رمان نبود.یه تجربه در نوشتار بود ویه جور بازیگوشی.شاید در زمانه دهه 70 و هیپی بازی این شلختگی و ولنگاری در ادبیات خیلی جالب بود(یه جورایی منو یاد کنسرت وود استاک و علف انداخت)ولی از نگاه من رمان نبود.شاید ترجمه بسیار بد و لفظ به لفظ از کتاب اصلی منجر به چنین چیز درهم و برهمی شده چون م...more

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Mar 27, 2010 Liam rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: absolutely nobody!

Recommended to Liam by: ignorant hippies

Shelves: fiction

This book is one of the most overrated pieces of shit in the history of publishing. After listening to every hippie I had ever come into contact with praise it fulsomely, I had the misfortune to finally read it for myself when I was about 19. Like many teenagers, I used to smoke a lot of what was colloquially known, once upon a time, as reefer. Even that, however, wasn't enough to make this book even remotely enjoyable. I recently got a copy for free, and read it again just to double-check my e...more

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Feb 13, 2013 Toby rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review may contain spoilers.

Firstly, I love vignettes.

I am a big fan of the short story and I generally feel that it is somewhat undervalued as a literary form here in the UK, often relegated in importance as a practice run for aspiring novelists when, in actuality, it demands a careful (and completely un-novelistic) degree of structural precision in order to succeed. Still, perhaps because I've read too many short stories (you can never read too many) or because I've spent too many hours...more This review may contain spoilers.

Firstly, I love vignettes.

I am a big fan of the short story and I generally feel that it is somewhat undervalued as a literary form here in the UK, often relegated in importance as a practice run for aspiring novelists when, in actuality, it demands a careful (and completely un-novelistic) degree of structural precision in order to succeed. Still, perhaps because I've read too many short stories (you can never read too many) or because I've spent too many hours trying (often unsuccessfully) to write my own, I sometimes feel a little too aware of the short story's keen emphasis on synthesised effect.

At the other end of the short fiction spectrum lies the fragment; an either intentionally or unintentionally unfinished piece of the literature, left rough-hewn or broken, usually because the author has died or because they have got stuck or found nothing more to add. The literary fragment can refer to longer works or poetry (see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'Kubla Khan' for perhaps the most famous example) but in the last century it has become a popular form in its own right, especially with exiles and authors caught in conflict. Written out of desperation or despair, the fragmented form of these often emotionally-wrought pieces of prose go some way towards delineating the writer's state of mind.

Somewhere in between these two lies the vignette, which brilliantly originally means "something that may be written on a vine-leaf." This quite nicely reflects the seemingly casual nature of the form; a short, impressionistic, almost poetic piece of prose. This isn't to say that vignettes generally depict carefree subject matter, indeed I came to know the pleasures of this form through two of its masters, Guy de Maupassant and Saadat Hasan Manto, both war-time writers who have composed many meditative little pieces highlighting the strangeness of living in a time of conflict.

Richard Brautigan wrote Trout Fishing in America in 1961 when, to borrow from Bob Dylan, the times they certainly were a-changin'. The pressing issues of sexuality, race, civil rights and social change, not to mention the international presence of communism, were prevalent in the work of numerous politically-conscious artists; the Dylan-headed folk revival, the Beat generation (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Wiliam S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, etc.) and the ensuing psychedelic counter culture (Ken Kesey, the Grateful Dead, etc.). Considering that it was written smack bang in the middle of this tempestuous and iconic era in America's cultural history, I see Trout Fishing in America as something of an oddity.

Setting out as a (very) loose travelogue of Brautigan's movements past and present, this collection of vignettes wanders back and forth between his childhood in the Pacific North-West, his contemporary life in San Francisco and a camping trip taken with his wife and daughter, on which he apparently wrote most of this of this book and on which he spends a lot of time fishing for trout, funnily enough. When detailing these fishing trips, Brautigan, at turns, pays homage to, pastiches, and occasionally pokes fun at those nature-loving greats of American literature, particularly Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, who so importantly promoted the transcendental benefits of a rural existence, of living "off the fatta the lan." Soon enough however, The phrase "Trout Fishing in America" starts to take on a different meaning with each vignette, standing in for the names of people, places, insults, abstract notions, and with these shifts Brautigan begins to contemplate America's cultural history as it has developed since the influential writings of Throeau et al. In 'Trout Fishing in America Terrorists,' the reader is introduced to Brautigan as a child in a coming-of-age anecdote relating the inscribing of "Trout Fishing in America" in chalk across the back of every first-grader in school before being reprimanded by his headmaster and then finally, poignantly, allowing the joke to die. In 'Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America,' Brautigan takes on a hard-boiled tone as he details the lives of a pimp and a hustler, holed up together in a now recognisably named hotel. Most entertaining however are the nods and jibes directed at his contemporaries. I have enjoyed some of the Beats in the past (Burroughs, Ginsberg) and others not so much (Kerouac) but one thing that I find a little annoying about them is that they continually celebrate themselves as a 'collective' ("the best minds of my generation" as Ginsberg puts it in Howl). Brautigan, whilst no doubt influenced by the Beats (he references Burroughs in the text) takes care not to take himself or any of his contemporaries quite so seriously. This can be seen in the text's simultaneous advancement and lampooning of the stream-of-consciousness writing style, championed by Kerouac & co. Within the same slim tome one finds 'Sea, Sea Rider', one of the most enchanting pieces of digressive, surrealistic writing I think I've ever read, and then 'The Teddy Roosevelt Chingader'', a stylistically similar yet comically mundane retelling of a camping trip in which Brautigan buys a pair of socks but, lamentably, loses his refund guarantee.

The details of these vignettes probably won't find a precious place in your memory but when read together (as is often the case with good collections of vignettes) they form a lasting overall impression. This good-natured and humorous book promotes a carefree approach to writing which, in this case, yields wildly creative results. I was struck, not only by the singular confidence of Brautigan's authorial voice but also by how contemporary it sounded. The following quote from 'The Surgeon', in which he describes a fishing trip with a particularly belligerent doctor, could easily have been heard from a friend, retelling a discussion regarding Obamacare:

'I've never turned away a patient in my life, and I've never known another doctor who has. Last year I wrote off six thousand dollars worth of bad debts,' he said.

I was going to say to say that a sick person should never under any conditions be a bad debt, but I decided to forget it. Nothing was going to be proved or changed on the shores of Little Redfish Lake. (p. 96)

Bloody hippies.(less)

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Jun 16, 2012 Astrid Virili rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Pesca alla trota in America �� composto da tanti piccoli racconti, che potranno sembrarvi surreali o strampalati, a me fanno venire in mente tante scaglie colorate sul ventre di una trota iridata appena uscita dall'acqua. Non �� un manuale di pesca, ma (spoiler) alla fine c'�� della mayonnaise quindi leggendolo non correte il rischio di morire di fame.
Nel marzo del 1994, un ragazzo di nome Peter Eastman Jr. di Carpinteria, California cambi�� nome in Pesca alla Trota in America, e attualmente in...more

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Jan 03, 2012 Linda rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I remembered that I had read TFIA when I read something in the newspaper about fishing this week. I worked in a library at the time TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA was published, and I remember a colleague laughing about an article that she had read in a library magazine. (A professional journal, if you will.) Sporting good stores by the 100's ordered this book, which is fiction and by a crazy man, for their fishing sections. Wow, were they surprised when this thing came in. TFIA was my first Richard B...more

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Sep 16, 2007 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literature

Its about two thirty on a summer Sunday, the sun's glancin' off the creek, the birds are tittin' and Garrison Keiller is on some mild psychedelics, ready to tell you about 'Merica.

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Aug 20, 2009 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is one of my favorite books ever of all time. Pure nonsense, yet as wise as the hills. I used to carry this slim, battered paperback around with me in my pocket constantly in my youth in the arid mountains of south eastern Arizona, a land where trout seemed as whimsical creatures as mermaids, though I had caught trout in England, and beautiful trout in Scotland before that, when I was a boy there. At the time, this book was like a nonsensical bible in my life. I would read passages aloud by...more

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Aug 21, 2011 alex rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

essentially a coasting, pointless read. when i read the namedrops 'burroughs and kerouac' on a front-cover review, i expected the worst. however, it doesn't burden me with the kind of resentment and hatred for in-crowd bullshit that the aforementioned two manage to. i'm not sure whether this is better or worse. i picked up trout fishing... because i was bored, between books, and it's sunday so i can't go out and buy anything new. it took about an hour, and it was about as enriching as an hour sp...more

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About Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan was a 20th century American writer. His novels and stories often have to do with black comedy, parody, satire, and Zen Buddhism. He is probably best known for his novel Trout Fishing in America. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1984.

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Books by Richard Brautigan

Trout Fishing in America / The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar

The Abortion: An Historical Romance, 1966

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Quotes from Trout Fishing In America

“Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream.
I'm not, she said.” — 48 people liked it

“He created his own Kool Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.” — 31 people liked it

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Trout Fishing in America

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