Collected in one volume, three counterculture classics that embody the spirit of the 1960s. Included here are three great works by the incomparable Richard Brautigan: Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through the country's rural waterways—a book "that has very little to do with trout fishing and a lot to do with the lamenting of a passing pastoral America . . . An instant cult classic" ( Financial Times). The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is a collection of nearly one hundred poems, first published in 1968. And In Watermelon Sugar expresses the mood of a new generation, revealing death as a place where people travel the length of their dreams, rejecting violence and hate. During his lifetime, Look magazine observed, "Brautigan is joining Hesse, Golding, Salinger, and Vonnegut as a literary magus to the literate young." A uniquely imaginative writer of the Beat movement who became an icon of the hippie era, he is still a favorite of readers today.
