Richard Brautigan Books in Order

Lee Mellon, who may be descended from a Confederate general, invites the narrator into an eccentric life around Big Sur. Their rambling misadventures turn history, friendship, and rebellion against ordinary life into comic invention.

A shy librarian tends a San Francisco library devoted to unpublished books, where manuscripts are accepted but never read. When Vida arrives, their tender relationship and an unplanned pregnancy lead them on a life-altering trip.

A chain of dreamlike episodes follows a narrator through San Francisco, Idaho streams, and memories of the Pacific Northwest. Trout Fishing in America becomes a person, pastime, and slippery idea in this funny, melancholy book.

In the strange settlement of iDEATH, people build their lives from watermelon sugar beneath suns that change color every day. An unnamed narrator records love, memory, and tensions with a nearby community shaped by its violent past.

Nearly one hundred short poems bring together love, loneliness, war, nature, and everyday American oddities. Brautigan's plain language and abrupt turns make small observations feel funny, uneasy, or unexpectedly tender.

These compact poems move from history and war to roadside scenes, love, and private jokes. Brautigan pairs conversational language with sharp, strange images, often finding humor in the gap between large events and ordinary life.

Sixty-two very short stories, written between 1962 and 1970, catch strange moments in California and beyond. The pieces range from comic to sad, with fishing, childhood, romance, and sudden surreal turns appearing in a few pages.

In 1902 Oregon, gunmen Cameron and Greer are hired by Magic Child to confront a monster beneath the isolated Hawkline house. The result is a deadpan mix of Western adventure, Gothic menace, and strangeness.

In early-1970s San Francisco, a papier-mâché bird and stolen bowling trophies sit at the center of several lonely lives. As the vengeful Logan brothers search for their trophies, Brautigan turns a mystery into deadpan, sad comedy.

Across 127 brief poems, Brautigan looks at love, travel, memories, animals, and failed ambitions with dry humor. The title image sets the mood: everyday effort made strange, impossible, and oddly human.

A heartbroken San Francisco writer cannot let go of his Japanese former lover, while a discarded story begins running on its own. In that tale, a sombrero falls from the sky and sends a small town toward absurd chaos.

During wartime San Francisco, broke private eye C. Card takes on a case while repeatedly escaping into fantasies of Babylon. This crooked, comic detective story follows his efforts to act tough when reality keeps getting stranger.

Written during a seven-week stay in Japan, these 77 diary-like poems record travel, loneliness, curiosity, and daily details. The collection shows Brautigan observing an unfamiliar place with brevity, humor, and unease.

Built from 131 short pieces, this collection travels between Japan and Montana, where Brautigan divided his time. These stations mix autobiography, small encounters, jokes, and quiet observations of travel and home.

A man in 1979 returns in memory to a poor Oregon childhood, a pond, and one afternoon that altered everything. The fractured recollections build quietly toward a painful event he has spent decades carrying.

Told as a restless travel journal, this posthumous novel follows a man moving through America while thoughts of suicide, illness, and loss keep resurfacing. Its brief episodes balance dark humor with an unsettled sense of grief.

An art book pairing Richard Prince's colorful, deliberately rough Hippie Drawings with text by Richard Brautigan. It offers a visual detour from Brautigan's fiction, focused on Prince's playful figures, watercolors, and oddball humor.