The first general nonfiction title in thirty years from a giant of American letters, The Search for the Genuine is a sparkling, definitive collection of Jim Harrison's essays and journalism--some never before published New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was a writer with a poet's economy of style and trencherman's appetites and ribald humor. In The Search for the Genuine, a collection of new and previously published essays, the giant of letters muses on everything from grouse hunting fishing to Zen Buddhism and matters of the spirit, including reported pieces on Yellowstone and shark-tagging in the open ocean, commentary on writers from Bukowski to Neruda to Peter Matthiessen, and a heartbreaking essay on life-- and, for those attempting to cross in the ever-more-dangerous gaps, death--on the US/Mexico border. Written with Harrison's trademark humor, compassion, and full-throated zest for life, this chronicle of a modern bon vivant is a feast for fans who may think they know Harrison's nonfiction, from a true "American original" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Now available in a Grove edition for the first time, Dalva is one of the finest novels by New York Times bestselling, much beloved author Jim Harrison: a beautifully crafted story of one woman's journey to find her son. From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam--and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul. One of Harrison's most ambitious novels, Dalva explores an extraordinary family through the strong, engaging voice of an unforgettable woman, confirming Harrison as one of America's most memorable writers.

After this all-but-unknown poet was called an "American master" in a long, gorgeous review in "The New York Times, " Tom Hennen was finally "discovered," and his book became a poetry best-seller

"It's hard to believe that this American master--and I don't use those words lightly--has been hidden right under our noses for decades. But despite his lack of recognition, Mr. Hennen...has simply gone about his calling with humility and gratitude in a culture whose primary crop has become fame. He just watches, waits and then strikes, delivering heart-buckling lines." --Dana Jennings, "The New York Times"

"As with Ted Kooser, Tom Hennen is a genius of the common touch. . . . They are amazingly modest men who early accepted poetry as a calling in ancient terms and never let up despite being ignored early on. They return to the readers a thousandfold for their attentions."--Jim Harrison, from the introduction

"Many readers will appreciate this evocation of a life not as commonly portrayed in contemporary verse."--"Library Journal"

"There is something of the ancient Chinese poets in Hennen, of Clare and Thoreau, although he is very much a contemporary poet."--"Willow Springs"

"One of the most charming things about Tom Hennen's poems is his strange ability to bring immense amounts of space, often uninhabited space, into his mind and so into the whole poem."--Robert Bly

"America is a country that loves its advertising. That loves its boxes we can put people and places into. We love 'Heartland' as opposed to 'Dustbowl.' We also love to be surprised. Rural Minnesota, as written by Tom Hennen in "Darkness Sticks to Everything, " is a world of realistic loneliness and lessons. It's a collection of sincere poems about man and the land."--"The Rumpus"

"Hennen is a master of the prose poem who] can take little details, tiny details and make them universal."--"River Falls Journal"

"What separates Hennen from many of his contemporaries is his willingness to identify with the natural world in a way that feels neither possessive nor self-serving, but simply (once again) sincere."--"Basalt Magazine"

"There is something strong in all Tom Hennen's poems, an awareness and a clear, sure voice... I don't usually want to end by saying 'Buy this book, ' but I'm going to say it this time: 'You should buy this book.'"--Fleda Brown, Interlochen Public Radio

" A] delight to read for the person who is willing to slow down with Hennen and take a look under a leaf, or at a bee, or into their own reflection in a rain drop."--"The Corresponder"Tom Hennen gives voice to the prairie and to rural communities, celebrating--with sadness, praise, and astute observations--the land, weather, and inhabitants. In short lyrics and prose poems, he reveals the detailed strangeness of ordinary things. Gathered from six chapbooks that were regionally distributed, this volume is Hennen's long-overdue introduction to a national audience. Includes an introduction by Jim Harrison and an afterword by Thomas R. Smith.

"In Falling Snow at a Farm Auction"

"Straight pine chair
Comfortable
In anyone's company,
Older than grandmother
It enters the present
Its arms wide open
Wanting to hold another young wife."

Tom Hennen, author of six books of poetry, was born and raised in rural Minnesota. After abandoning college, he married and began work as a letterpress and offset printer. He helped found the Minnesota Writer's Publishing House, then worked for the Department of Natural Resources wildlife section, and later at the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota. Now retired, he lives in Minnesota.

"The way Harrison has embedded his entire vision of our predicament implicitly in the particulars of two poetic lives, his own and Yesenin's, is what makes the poem not only his best but one of the best in the past twenty-five years of American writing."-Hayden Carruth, Sulfur

"Harrison inhabits the problems of our age as if they were beasts into which he had crawled, and Letters to Yesenin is a kind of imaginative taxidermy that refuses to stay in place up on the trophy room wall, but insists on walking into the dining room."-The American Poetry Review

Jim Harrison's gorgeous, desperate, and harrowing "correspondence" with Sergei Yesenin-a Russian poet who committed suicide after writing his final poem in his own blood-is considered an American masterwork.

In the early 1970s, Harrison was living in poverty on a hardscrabble farm, suffering from depression and suicidal tendencies. In response he began to write daily prose-poem letters to Yesenin. Through this one-sided correspondence, Harrison unloads to this unlikely hero, ranting and raving about politics, drinking problems, family concerns, farm life, and a full range of daily occurrences. The rope remains ever present.

Yet sometime through these letters there is a significant shift. Rather than feeling inextricably linked to Yesenin's inevitable path, Harrison becomes furious, arguing about their imagined relationship: "I'm beginning to doubt whether we ever would have been friends."

In the end, Harrison listened to his own poems: "My year-old daughter's red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop."

Named to the Notable Books of the Year lists from The Kansas City Star and the Michigan Library Association.

"Jim Harrison is a writer with immortality in him."-The Times (London)

"This is [Harrison's] most robust, sure-footed, and blood-raising poetry collection to date."-Booklist

Jim Harrison-one of America's most beloved writers-calls his poetry "the true bones of my life." Although he is best known as a fiction writer, it is as a poet that Publishers Weekly famously called him an "untrammeled renegade genius."

Saving Daylight, Harrison's tenth collection of poetry, is his first book of new poems in a decade. All of Harrison's abundant passions for life are poured into suites, prose poems, letter-poems, and even lyrics for a mariachi band.

The subjects and concerns are wide-ranging-from the heart-rending "Livingston Suite," where a boy drowns in the local river and the body is discovered by the poet's wife-to some of the most harrowing political poems of Harrison's career. There is also a cast of creature characters-bears, dogs, birds, fish-as well as the woodlands, thickets, and occasional cities of Arizona, Montana, Michigan, France, and Mexico.

"Imagination is my only possession," Harrison once said. And Saving Daylight is an imagination in full, exuberant bloom.

Jim Harrison is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His work has been translated into dozens of languages. Born and raised in Michigan, he now lives in Montana and Arizona.

Selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Off to the Side is the tale of one of America's most beloved writers. Jim Harrison traces his upbringing in Michigan amid the austerities of the Depression and the Second World War, and the seemingly greater austerities of his starchy Swedish forebears. He chronicles his coming-of-age, from a boy drunk with books to a young man making his way among fellow writers he deeply admires including Peter Matthiessen, Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Allen Ginsberg. Harrison discusses forthrightly the life-changing experience of becoming a father, and the minor cognitive dissonance that ensued when this boy from the "heartland" somehow ended up a highly paid Hollywood screenwriter. He gives free rein to his "seven obsessions" alcohol, food, stripping, hunting and fishing (and the dogs who have accompanied him in both), religion, the road, and our place in the natural world which he elucidates with earthy wisdom and an elegant sense of connectedness. Off to the Side is a work of great beauty and importance, a triumphant achievement that captures the writing life and brings all of us clues for living.

In three novellas, Jim Harrison takes us on an American journey as he leads us through the wondrous landscape of the human heart. "Julip" follows a bright and resourceful young woman as she tries to spring her brother from a Florida jail--he shot three of her former lovers "below the belt." "The Seven-Ounce Man" continues the picaresque adventures of Brown Dog, a Michigan scoundrel who loves to eat, drink, and chase women, all while sailing along in the bottom 10 percent. "The Beige Dolorosa" is the haunting tale of an academic who, recovering from the repercussions of a sexual harassment scandal, turns to the natural world for solace. In each of these stories, the irresistible pull of nature becomes a magnificent backdrop for exploring the toughest questions about life and love.

After being blinded in one eye, a young boy becomes wild and unruly, until he discovers the wonders of nature in the Michigan woods near his family's summer cabin.

The Road Home lies in the shadows of Manifest Destiny and Wounded Knee; it is etched into the landscape of an old man's memory and into the stubborn dreams of a young man's heart. In Jim Harrison's latest masterpiece, five members of the Northridge family narrate the tangled epic of their history on the expanses of the Nebraska plains. They strive to understand their fates, reconcile with demons of the past, love with honor, live in accordance with the land and the lessons in humility it teaches them. And to die with grace. As the family grapples with the mysterious forces that both pull them apart and draw them inextricably back together, they learn of life's lessons: the deception of passion, the pain of love, the vitality of art, and the supplication to nature's generosity and fury.

"Funny and tender beneath a wry and gruff seen-it-all veneer, Harrison contemplates death, discerns divinity in every stone and leaf, and nobility in ordinary lives, and laughs at our attempts to separate ourselves from the rest of nature."--"Booklist"

"His poems succeed on the basis of an open heart and a still-ravenous appetite for life."--"The Texas Observer"

Now in paperback, Jim Harrison's best-selling poetry book "In Search of Small Gods" is where birds and humans converse, autobiographies are fluid, and unknown gods flutter just out of sight. In terrains real and imagined--from remote canyons and anonymous thickets in the American West to secret basements in World War II Europe--Harrison calls upon readers to live fully in a world where "Death steals everything except our stories."

"Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the wrong crowd of
gods when I was seven. At first they weren't harmful and only showed
themselves as fish, birds, especially herons and loons, turtles, a bobcat
and a small bear, but not deer and rabbits who only offered themselves
as food. And maybe I spent too much time inside the water of
lakes and rivers. Underwater seemed like the safest church I could
go to . . . "

Jim Harrison is one of America's most versatile and celebrated writers. He is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including "Legends of the Fall" and "Dalva." His work has been translated into two dozen languages. He lives in Arizona and Montana.

"A Really Big Lunch showcases Harrison's enthusiastic, funny, and uncompromising views on how to eat, drink, and live well . . . His writing is bodily, bawdy, sharp. The more we have of his voice, the better."--Boston Globe A national bestseller and an Amazon Best Book of the Month in the Cookbook/Food & Wine category, now in paperback, A Really Big Lunch collects many of New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison's essays on food for the first time--and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve. In these pieces, Harrison muses on the relationship between hunter and prey, interrogates the obscure language of wine reviews, and delivers a manifesto against the bland, mass-produced food of our time, proposing instead what he calls the Vivid Diet. He delights in food from the most outre indulgence (a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses) to a simple bowl of menudo. Harrison's food writing is a program for living, and A Really Big Lunch is shot through with his pointed apercus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison's life over the last fifteen years. Lovingly introduced by master chef Mario Batali, A Really Big Lunch is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite. "The collection is chockablock with . . . zingers as well as plenty of half-baked, hilarious theories you can ponder while planning your first summer barbecue."--The Paris Review

Jim Harrison is one of this country's most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. For more than twenty years, he has also been writing some of the best essays on food around, now collected in a volume that caused the Santa Fe New Mexican to exclaim: "To read this book is to come away convinced that Harrison is a flat-out genius -- one who devours life with intensity, living it roughly and full-scale, then distills his experiences into passionate, opinionated prose. Food, in this context, is more than food: It is a metaphor for life." From his legendary Smart and Esquire columns, to present-day pieces including a correspondence with French gourmet Gerard Oberle, fabulous pieces on food in France and America for Men's Journal, and a paean to the humble meatball, The Raw and the Cooked is a nine-course meal that will satisfy every appetite. "Our 'poet laureate of appetite' Harrison] may be, but the collected essays here reflect much more." -- John Gamino, The Dallas Morning News " A] culinary combo plate of Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Julian Schnabel, and Sam Peckinpah...." -- Jane and Michael Stern, The New York Times Book Review "Jim Harrison is the Henry Miller of food writing. His passion is infectious." -- Jeffrey Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal

An epic tale that pits a son against the legacy of his family's desecration of the earth, and his own father's more personal violations, Jim Harrison's True North is a beautiful and moving novel that speaks to the territory in our hearts that calls us back to our roots. The scion of a family of wealthy timber barons, David Burkett has grown up with a father who is a malevolent force and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills. He and his sister Cynthia, a firecracker who scandalizes the family at fourteen by taking up with the son of their Finnish-Native American gardener, are mostly left to make their own way. As David comes to adulthood-often guided and enlightened by the unforgettable, intractable, courageous women he loves-he realizes he must come to terms with his forefathers' rapacious destruction of the woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as well as the working people who made their wealth possible. Jim Harrison has given us a family tragedy of betrayal, amends, and justice for the worst sins. True North is a bravura performance from one of our finest writers, accomplished with deep humanity, humor, and redemptive soul.

Johnny Lundgren, a.k.a. Warlock, is an unemployed foundation executive who, after surviving a midlife crisis, finally decides to get a job. Warlock soon gets hired by a crazy, but genius doctor as a trouble-shooter, where he's tasked with everything battling poachers in the haunted wilderness of northern Michigan to investigating his employer’s wife and son in the seamy underside of Key West. A comedy with one foot in the abyss, Warlock is what the New York Times called “farcical, reflective, luscious, gritty” entertainment from one of this country’s most beloved authors.

In the universally-praised Returning to Earth, Jim Harrison has delivered a masterpiece a tender, profound, and magnificent novel about life, death, and the possibility of finding redemption in unlikely places. Donald is a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man slowly dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. His condition deteriorating, he realizes no one will be able to pass on to his children their family history once he is gone. He begins dictating to his wife, Cynthia, stories he has never shared with anyone as around him, his family struggles to lay him to rest with the same dignity with which he has lived. Over the course of the year following Donald's death, his daughter begins studying Chippewa ideas of death for clues about her father's religion, while Cynthia, bereft of the family she created to escape the malevolent influence of her own father, finds that redeeming the past is not a lost cause. Returning to Earth is a deeply moving book about origins and endings, making sense of loss, and living with honor for the dead. It is among the finest novels of Harrison's long, storied career, and confirms his standing as one of the most important American writers now working.

James Welch never shied away from depicting the lives of Native Americans damned by destiny and temperament to the margins of society. "The Death of Jim Loney" is no exception. Jim Loney is a mixed-blood, of white and Indian parentage. Estranged from both communities, he lives a solitary, brooding existence in a small Montana town. His nights are filled with disturbing dreams that haunt his waking hours. Rhea, his lover, cannot console him; Kate, his sister, cannot penetrate his world. In sparse, moving prose, Welch has crafted a riveting tale of disenfranchisement and self-destruction.

The New York Times bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. Sundog is a powerful novel about the life and loves of a foreman named Robert Corvus Strang, who worked on giant dam projects around the world until he was crippled in a fall down a three-hundred-foot dam. Now as he tries to regain use of his legs, he has a chance to reassess his life, and a blase journalist who has heard of Strang's reputation in the field arrives to draw him out about his various incarnations. Strang who has the violently heightened sensibilities of a man who has gone to the limits and back recounts his monumental life moving from Michigan to Africa and the Amazon, including his several marriages and children, and dozens of lovers. "A feisty, passionate novel" (Newsday) from a writer whose "storytelling instincts are nearly flawless" (The New York Times), Sundog is a story as true and gripping as real life, and ultimately as victorious.

New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison was one of America's most beloved and critically acclaimed writers. The classic Legends of the Fall is Harrison at his most memorable: a striking collection of novellas written with exceptional brilliance and a ferocious love of life. The title novella, "Legends of the Fall"--which was made into the film of the same name--is an epic, moving tale of three brothers fighting for justice in a world gone mad. Moving from the raw landscape of early twentieth-century Montana to the blood-drenched European battlefields of World War I and back again to Montana, Harrison's powerful story explores the theme of revenge and the actions to which people resort when their lives or goals are threatened, painting an unforgettable portrait of the twentieth-century man. Also including the novellas "Revenge" and "The Man Who Gave Up His Name," Legends of the Fall confirms Jim Harrison's reputation as one of the finest American voices of his generation.

Here is the definitive collection of poetry from one of America's best-loved writers-now available in paperback. With the publication of this book, eight volumes of poetry were brought back into print, including the early nature-based lyrics of "Plain Song," the explosive "Outlyer & Ghazals," and the startling "correspondence" with a dead Russian poet in "Letters to Yesenin." Also included is an introduction by Harrison, several previously uncollected poems, and "Geo-Bestiary," a 34-part paean to earthly passions. "The Shape of the Journey" confirms Jim Harrison's place among the most brilliant and essential poets writing today.

"Behind the words one always feels the presence of a passionate, exuberant man who is at the same time possessed of a quick, subtle intelligence and a deeply questioning attitude toward life. Harrison writes so winningly that one is simply content to be in the presence of a writer this vital, this large-spirited."-"The New York Times Book Review"

"(An) untrammelled renegade genius here's a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."-"Publishers Weekly"

"Readers can wander the woods of this collection for a lifetime and still be amazed at what they find."-"Booklist" (starred review.)

When the cloth edition of this book was first published, it immediately became one of Copper Canyon Press's all-time bestsellers. It was featured on Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac," became a finalist for the "Los Angeles Times Book Prize," and was selected as one of the "Top-Ten Books of 1998" by "Booklist."

Jim Harrison is the author of twenty books, including "Legends of the Fall" and "The Road Home." He has also written numerous screenplays and served as the food columnist for "Esquire" magazine. He lives in Michigan and Arizona.

Dead Deer

Amid pale green milkweed, wild clover,
a rotted deer
curled, shaglike,
after a winter so cold
the trees split open.
I think she couldn't keep up with
the others (they had no place
to go) and her food,
frozen grass and twigs,

Rapturously received by critics and enthusiastically embraced by readers, The Great Leader is an enthralling, blackly comic take on the detective story that follows a retired detective in hilarious and bold pursuit of a sinister cult leader. Detective Sunderson is on the verge of retirement when he begins to investigate a hedonistic cult that has set up camp near his home in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. At first, the self-declared Great Leader seems merely a harmless oddball, but as Sunderson and his unlikely sixteen-year-old sidekick dig deeper, they find him more intelligent and sinister than they realized. Recently divorced and frequently pickled in alcohol, Sunderson tracks his quarry from the woods of Michigan to a town in Arizona, filled with professional and criminal border-crossers, and on to Nebraska where the Great Leader's most recent recruits have gathered to glorify his questionable religion. But Sunderson's demons are also in pursuit of him. Rich with character, unexpected twists, and Harrison's trademark wry wit, The Great Leader is at once a gripping American odyssey and the poignant story of a man grappling with age, lost love, and his own darker nature.