Pacific Northwest Literature 101
Explore the literature of the Pacific Northwest with this introductory guide. Discover key authors, themes, and works. Start learning!
Book
Sometimes a Great Notion
by Ken Kesey
Story of the Stamper family and their struggles in the Oregon timber country.
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The River why
by David James Duncan
Since its publication by Sierra Club Books nearly two decades ago, The River Why has become a classic, standing with Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It as the most-read fiction about fly-fishing of our era. Duncan's protagonist, Gus Orviston, is an irreverent young flyfisherman--a vibrant character who makes us laugh easily and feel deeply, and who speaks with startling truth about the way we live. Leaving behind a madcap, fishing-obsessed family, Gus embarks on an extraordinary voyage of self-discovery along his beloved Oregon rivers. What he unexpectedly finds is man's wanton destruction of nature and a burning desire to commit himself to its preservation. The River Why is a tale that gives a contemporary voice to the concerns and hopes of all living things on this beautiful, watery planet. It is the story of one man's search for meaning, for love, and for a sane way to live.
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey's bracing, inslightful novel about the meaning of madness and the value of self-reliance, and the inspiration for the new Netflix original series Ratched Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned.
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Book
Another Roadside Attraction
by Tom Robbins
“Written with a style and humor that haven’t been seen since Mark Twain.”—Los Angeles Times What if the Second Coming didn’t quite come off as advertised? What if “the Corpse” on display in that funky roadside zoo is really who they say it is—what does that portend for the future of western civilization? And what if a young clairvoyant named Amanda reestablishes the flea circus as popular entertainment and fertility worship as the principal religious form of our high-tech age? Another Roadside Attraction answers those questions and a lot more. It tell us, for example, what the sixties were truly all about, not by reporting on the psychedelic decade but by recreating it, from the inside out. In the process, this stunningly original seriocomic thriller is fully capable of simultaneously eating a literary hot dog and eroding the borders of the mind. “Hard to put down because of the sheer brilliance and fun of the writing. The sentiments of Brautigan and the joyously compassionate omniscience of Fielding dance through the pages garbed colorfully in the language of Joyce.”—Rolling Stone
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Snow Falling on Cedars
by David Guterson
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PEN/Faulkner Award Winner • A gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric masterpiece of courtroom suspense—one that leaves us shaken and changed. "Haunting .... A whodunit complete with courtroom maneuvering and surprising turns of evidence and at the same time a mystery, something altogether richer and deeper." —Los Angeles Times San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries—memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo's wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.
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The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
by Sherman Alexie
In his darkly comic short story collection, the author brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation.
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The Brothers K
by David James Duncan
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK Once in a great while a writer comes along who can truly capture the drama and passion of the life of a family. David James Duncan, author of the novel The River Why and the collection River Teeth, is just such a writer. And in The Brothers K he tells a story both striking and in its originality and poignant in its universality. This touching, uplifting novel spans decades of loyalty, anger, regret, and love in the lives of the Chance family. A father whose dreams of glory on a baseball field are shattered by a mill accident. A mother who clings obsessively to religion as a ward against the darkest hour of her past. Four brothers who come of age during the seismic upheavals of the sixties and who each choose their own way to deal with what the world has become. By turns uproariously funny and deeply moving, and beautifully written throughout, The Brothers K is one of the finest chronicles of our lives in many years. Praise for The Brothers K “The pages of The Brothers K sparkle.”—The New York Times Book Review “Duncan is a wonderfully engaging writer.”—Los Angeles Times “This ambitious book succeeds on almost every level and every page.”—USA Today “Duncan’s prose is a blend of lyrical rhapsody, sassy hyperbole and all-American vernacular.”—San Francisco Chronicle “The Brothers K affords the . . . deep pleasures of novels that exhaustively create, and alter, complex worlds. . . . One always senses an enthusiastic and abundantly talented and versatile writer at work.”—The Washington Post Book World “Duncan . . . tells the larger story of an entire popular culture struggling to redefine itself—something he does with the comic excitement and depth of feeling one expects from Tom Robbins.”—Chicago Tribune
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Richard Brautigan's A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster
by Richard Brautigan
Three books in the manner of their original editions.
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