An Unfortunate Woman - by Richard Brautigan (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Richard Brautigan's last novel, published in the U.S. for the first time

Richard Brautigan was an original--brilliant and wickedly funny, his books resonated with the sixties, making him an overnight counterculture hero. Taken in its entirety, his body of work reveals an artistry that outreaches the literary fads that so quickly swept him up.

Dark, funny, and exquisitely haunting, his final book-length fiction explores the fragile, mysterious shadowland surrounding death. Told with classic Brautigan wit, poetic style, and mordant irony, An Unfortunate Woman assumes the form of a peripatetic journal chronicling the protagonist's travels and oblique ruminations on the suicide of one woman, and a close friend's death from cancer.

After Richard Brautigan committed suicide, his only child, Ianthe Brautigan, found among his possessions the manuscript of An Unfortunate Woman. It had been completed over a year earlier, but was still unpublished at the time of his death. Finding it was too painful to face her father's presence page after page, she put the manuscript aside.

Years later, having completed a memoir about her father's life and death, Ianthe Brautigan reread An Unfortunate Woman, and finally, clear-eyed, she saw that it was her father's work at its best and had to be published.

Review Quotes

"I read it in one sitting - its only 110 pages - and felt the loss of this remarkable talent. His insights into life were incredible." --USA Today

"The gravity-free movement of Brautigan's remarkable mind, the piercing comic insights, the deft evocation of the thoroughly marginal places are aching reminders of this most original writer." --Thomas McGuane

"Richard Brautigan's An Unfortunate Woman is not only vintage Brautigan but is among his best, filled with breathtaking insights about our life now." --Jim Harrison

"How fortunate we are to have another book by our friend Richard Brautigan, a man we all respected and loved." --Peter Fonda

About the Author

Richard Brautigan published 11 novels, a book of short stories, and 8 books of poetry during his short life. He is best known for Troutfishing In America, which has sold over 3 million copies worldwide.