Fishing for trout in America

In Trout Fishing in America , Brautigan destabilizes the idea of a conventional book as he creates a world where things seem unlikely to stay in their proper places.

In Trout Fishing in America , Richard Brautigan translates his lysergic spirit into a metaliterary novel, without temporal sequence, with short chapters – which can be read almost independently – and linked by the same subject, the act that gives the work its title.

Originally published in 1967, the story spans Brautigan's childhood in the northwestern United States; his adult life in San Francisco; and a camping trip to Idaho with his wife and daughter in the summer of 1961, during which most of the chapters were written.

And, in this first Brautigan experiment with prose, we discover that Trout Fishing in America isn't just the title of a book. It can be a character, a hotel, the act of fishing itself, it can be accompanied by a recipe or the location of a note; it can be anything that Brautigan and his nonsense literature can transform.