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.

On the eve of his departure from Eugene, Oregon, to San Francisco and worldly success, a twenty-one-year-old unpublished writer named Richard Brautigan gave these funny, buoyant stories and poems as a gift to Edna Webster, the beloved mother of both his best friend and his first "real" girlfriend. "When I am rich and famous, Edna," he told her, "this will be your social security.' The stories and poems show Brautigan as hopelessly lovestruck, cheerily goofy, and at his most disarmingly innocent. We see not only a young man and young artist about to bloom, but also the whole literary sensibility of the 1960s counterculture about to spread its wings and fly.

Three unforgettable Brautigan masterpieces reissued in a one-volume omnibus edition.

REVENGE OF THE LAWN: Originally published in 1971, these bizarre flashes of insight and humor cover everything from "A High Building in Singapore" to the "Perfect California Day." This is Brautigan's only collection of stories and includes "The Lost Chapters of TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA."

THE ABORTION: AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE 1966: A public library in California where none of the books have ever been published is full of romantic possibilities. But when the librarian and his girlfriend must travel to Tijuana, they have a series of strange encounters in Brautigan's 1971 novel.

SO THE WIND WON'T BLOW IT ALL AWAY: It is 1979, and a man is recalling the events of his twelfth summer, when he bought bullets for his gun instead of a hamburger. Written just before his death, and published in 1982, this novel foreshadowed Brautigan's suicide.

Richard Brautigan was the author of ten novels, including a contemporary classic, Trout Fishing in America, nine volumes of poetry, and a collection of stories.Here are three Brautigan novels—A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon and The Hawkline Monster—reissues in a one-volume omnibus edition.

A Brautigan omnibus, reissued in paperback in celebration of its twentieth anniversary, this one-volume edition includes three contemporary classics that embody the spirit of the 1960s.

Concerns a writer trying to cope with the break-up of a relationship. Trying to escape his misery, he begins a story about a sombrero that falls out of the sky and lands in a small town. Unable to concentrate he throws the pages in the bin, and that's when it starts to take on a life of its own.