The Mark Twain Award–winning author of Legends of the Fall delivers three novellas that highlight his phenomenal range as a writer, shot through with his trademark wit and keen insight into the human condition.
Harrison has fun with his own reputation in the title novella, about an aging writer in Montana who weathers the slings and arrows of literary success and tries to cope with the sow he buys on a whim and the unplanned litter of piglets that follows soon after. In Eggs, a Montana woman reminisces about collecting eggs at her grandparents' country house. Years later, having never had a child, she attempts to do so. And in The Case of the Howling Buddhas, retired Detective Sunderson-a recurring character from Harrison's New York Times bestseller The Great Leader and The Big Seven-is hired to investigate a bizarre cult that achieves satori by howling along with howler monkeys at the zoo.
"No one writes more persuasively about the natural world, the ways of animals both wild and domestic, rural roughneck mores, hunting and fishing . . . The wisdom of age hasn't harmed him a bit."
David Gates, The New York Times Book Review
"His tales possess the hypnotic grace and momentum of a long-distance, freestyle swimmer, pages cleaving away like armstrokes . . . At the heart of all beats the essential Jim Harrison: big lives and full fare, start to finish; and at the book's conclusion one hates to see that end."
Rick Bass, The Boston Globe
"All three of these novellas traverse Harrison's familiar turf: the human relation to nature, how we live in it and consume it, how we believe we can rise above our natural urges and how often that makes us fools, and how nature's mortal effects on humans always win in the end."
