The Ancient Minstrel
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A collection of novellas from the New York Times–bestselling author—“arguably America’s foremost master of the novella . . . A force of nature on the page” (The Washington Post).
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.
“Still independent, fierce and feral,” The Ancient Minstrel confirms Jim Harrison as one of the most cherished and important writers in modern America (David Gates, The New York Times).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though this latest collection of novellas is one of his slimmer efforts, Harrison (Brown Dog) still has one of the most companionable voices in American letters. The first two entries in this collection revolve around animal husbandry an aging writer in the grip of a "pig trance" and a woman's lifelong "chicken obsession." The rangy title novella tells the story of "America's best-loved geezer," a figure very much like Jim Harrison, who is looking back on his "50-year slavery to language." Restless, losing his once prodigious libido, and beset by recurring nightmares, the narrator impulsively decides to raise pigs, a late-life crisis manifested in a desire to become the "prince of free-range pork." It's a loose, low-key reminiscence that affords some amusing glimpses into the writer's psyche. In "Eggs," Catherine, a woman living by herself on a Montana farm, finds herself in thrall to a biological impulse to reproduce. Catherine is a strange, independent, and phlegmatic heroine whose story steadily accrues emotional weight as we learn about her alcoholic father, her unhinged brother, her harrowing experience in London during the Blitz, and her romance with a wounded British soldier. Harrison revives his Detective Sunderson in "The Case of the Howling Buddhas." Now retired but no less libidinous, "an old boy on the loose again," Sunderson is enlisted to look into a mountebank cult leader, though the real drama involves the detective's illegal dalliance with a 15-year-old girl. This last novella is also the weakest, the shaggy-dog mystery fitting uneasily with the salacious, and not particularly convincing, erotic plot.
