Trout Fishing in America

  • Author Richard Brautigan
  • Narrator Chris Andrew Ciulla
  • Publisher Blackstone Publishing
  • Run Time 3 hours and 29 minutes
  • Format Audio
  • Genre Fiction: general and literary.
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What to expect

In its first time in audio and with an introduction written and read by poet Billy Collins, Trout Fishing in America is an indescribable romp, by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through America’s culture.

Richard Brautigan’s world is one of gentle magic and marvelous laughter, of the incredibly beautiful and the beautifully incredible. Trout Fishing in America is a pseudonym for the miraculous. A journey which begins at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco’s Washington Square, which wanders through the wonders of America’s rural waterways, and which ends, inevitably, with mayonnaise. Funny, wild, and sweet, Trout Fishing in America is an incomparable guidebook to the delights of exploration—both of land and mind.

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. His early books became required reading for the hip generation, and on its publication, Trout Fishing in America, considered by many as his best novel, became an international bestseller.With it Brautigan caught the public’s attention and became a cult hero. By 1970 Trout Fishing in America had become the namesake of a commune, a free school, an underground newspaper, and more.

Critics Review

  • “One of the under songs in the book is a kind of lament for the passing of a nineteenth-century or even earlier pastoral America and its replacement by an industrial America.”

    Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate

  • “Trout Fishing in America drifts like an easy creek. Don’t look for plot in the water; don’t look for plot in this book. The title becomes reference, character, joke, idea. Brautigan is playing around, associating, free-wheeling…What is the sum of all of this play? Is it nonsense? You get out of Trout Fishing in America what you allow the book to take from you. I return to the book not to seek profluence but to step in the water, feel the cool, and carry it with me.”

    LitHub

  • “A book infused with a bucolic surrealism and mournful psychedelia 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 (London)

  • “At times Brautigan can achieve absurdity which is Homeric…This book ought to be required reading in hippie pads.”

    Los Angeles Free Press

  • “Delicate, fantastic, and very funny.”

    Malcolm Bradbury, English author and academic

  • “First, poet Billy Collins reads his introduction with his usual dry wit, his easy soft-shoe with language setting the tone appropriately. Then comes the affable Chris Ciulia, who is unflappable as he makes his way through surreal scenes and plentiful similes that wash over the listener like a mountain stream. As with many risk-taking texts, this audiobook is best listened to with a relaxed ear; don’t try to ‘get the point,’ or you might miss it.”

    AudioFile

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