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Jim Harrison is one of America's most beloved and critically-acclaimed authors, on a par with American literary greats like Richard Ford, Anne Tyler, Robert Stone, Russell Banks, and Ann Beattie. His latest collection of novellas, The River Swimmer, is Harrison at his most memorable: a brilliant rendering of two men striving to find their way in the world, written with freshness, abundant wit, and profound humanity.
In The Land of Unlikeness, sixty-year-old art history academic Clive - a failed artist, divorced and grappling with the vagaries of his declining years - reluctantly returns to his family's Michigan farmhouse to visit his aging mother. The return to familiar territory triggers a jolt of renewal?of ardor for his high school love, of his relationship with his estranged daughter, and of his own lost love of painting. In Water Baby, Harrison ventures into the magical as an Upper Peninsula farm boy is irresistibly drawn to the water as an escape, and sees otherworldly creatures there. Faced with the injustice and pressure of coming of age, he takes to the river and follows its siren song all the way across Lake Michigan.
The River Swimmer is a striking portrait of two richly-drawn, profoundly human characters, and an exceptional reminder of why Jim Harrison is one of the most cherished and important writers at work today.
"Rich and satisfying." - Publishers Weekly
"Everyday epiphanies from a major author." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about The River Swimmer was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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Photo: Wyatt McSpadden
Jim Harrison spent much of his life in Michigan on a farm near where he was born. His connection to rural landscapes was evident in his free-verse, imagistic poetry, which often explored human and animal drives set against an unforgiving natural world.
Educated at Michigan State University, Harrison taught briefly at SUNY Stony Brook. After the publication of his first collection of poetry, Plain Song (1965), he returned to Michigan, where he worked as a freelance journalist and laborer until he began to earn a living from his writing.
Harrison has published more than a dozen collections of poetry and has also built a reputation as a fiction writer, publishing numerous novels and collections. His book Legends of the Fall (1979), received considerable critical acclaim and was made into a ...
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