Non-Fiction Books

Jim Harrison's essays and articles have been selected from twenty-five years of work, from venues as diverse as PLAYBOY, THE NATION, OUTSIDE, and the AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW. They explore the passions and concerns of a classic American writer: ice fishing and bar pool, nouvelle cuisine and night walks.

Jim Harrison is one of this country's most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. For more than twenty years, he has also been writing some of the best essays on food around, now collected in a volume that caused the Santa Fe New Mexican to exclaim: "To read this book is to come away convinced that Harrison is a flat-out genius — one who devours life with intensity, living it roughly and full-scale, then distills his experiences into passionate, opinionated prose. Food, in this context, is more than food: It is a metaphor for life." From his legendary Smart and Esquire columns, to present-day pieces including a correspondence with French gourmet Gerard Oberle, fabulous pieces on food in France and America for Men's Journal, and a paean to the humble meatball, The Raw and the Cooked is a nine-course meal that will satisfy every appetite. "Our 'poet laureate of appetite' [Harrison] may be, but the collected essays here reflect much more." — John Gamino, The Dallas Morning News "[A] culinary combo plate of Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Julian Schnabel, and Sam Peckinpah...." — Jane and Michael Stern, The New York Times Book Review "Jim Harrison is the Henry Miller of food writing. His passion is infectious." — Jeffrey Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal

Jim Harrison (b. 1937) is well known for his blunt, brave style in prose, poetry, screenplays, and nonfiction. In Conversations with Jim Harrison , the Michigan-born writer's directness and passion shine throughout. This book is the first-ever collection of interviews with this well-known, prolific writer whose books include twenty-two volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction published over a period of thirty-six years. In addition to standard literary forms, he has written sporting essays, reviews, literary journalism, food columns, and almost twenty screenplays. Harrison, a writer devoted to small presses and independent bookstores, has a formidable reputation as a recluse and defender of his privacy. However, he has been open to interviews in America and abroad, particularly in France, where he is very popular. Conversations with Jim Harrison features interviews given between 1976 and 1999. Although the conversations vary in length, most are traditional questions and answers. In these Harrison has the opportunity to develop his responses fully and cover a wider range of topics than he can in the briefer, profile pieces. Harrison discusses his peripatetic early life, his desire to be a poet since he was sixteen, and his subsequent "quadra schizoid" attraction to writing poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. A literary outsider who prefers rural life, Harrison talks in detail about his colorful, eventful life. He also explores the mutual enrichment he received from nature and civilization. He talks specifically about a number of his important books―including Wolf , Legends of the Fall , Sundog , Warlock , and The Road Home . Harrison speaks eloquently about habits of mind, aesthetic choices, intellectual resources, and psychological contexts in his writing. By turns thoughtful, cantankerous, witty, and erudite, his voice reveals a man fully given over to the single-minded pursuit of the art of writing.

Selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Off to the Side is the tale of one of America's most beloved writers. Jim Harrison traces his upbringing in Michigan amid the austerities of the Depression and the Second World War, and the seemingly greater austerities of his starchy Swedish forebears. He chronicles his coming-of-age, from a boy drunk with books to a young man making his way among fellow writers he deeply admires — including Peter Matthiessen, Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Allen Ginsberg. Harrison discusses forthrightly the life-changing experience of becoming a father, and the minor cognitive dissonance that ensued when this boy from the "heartland" somehow ended up a highly paid Hollywood screenwriter. He gives free rein to his "seven obsessions" — alcohol, food, stripping, hunting and fishing (and the dogs who have accompanied him in both), religion, the road, and our place in the natural world — which he elucidates with earthy wisdom and an elegant sense of connectedness. Off to the Side is a work of great beauty and importance, a triumphant achievement that captures the writing life and brings all of us clues for living.

The Etiquette of Freedom is an all–encompassing companion to the film The Practice of the Wild Gary Snyder joined his old friend, novelist Jim Harrison, to discuss their loves and lives and what has become of them throughout the years. Set amidst the natural beauty of the Santa Lucia Mountains, their conversations—harnessing their ideas of all that is wild, sacred and intimate in this world—move from the admission that Snyder's mother was a devout atheist to his personal accounts of his initiation into Zen Buddhist culture, being literally dangled by the ankles over a cliff. After years of living in Japan, Snyder returns to the States to build a farmhouse in the remote foothills of the Sierras, a homestead he calls Kitkitdizze. For all of the depth in these conversations, Jim Harrison and Gary Snyder are humorous and friendly, and with the artfully interspersed dialogue from old friends and loves like Scott Slovic, Michael McClure, Jack Shoemaker, and Joanne Kyger, the discussion reaches a level of not only the personal, but the global, redefining our idea of the Beat Generation and challenging the future directions of the environmental movement and its association with "Deep Ecology."

“ A Really Big Lunch showcases Harrison’s enthusiastic, funny, and uncompromising views on how to eat, drink, and live well . . . His writing is bodily, bawdy, sharp. The more we have of his voice, the better.”― Boston Globe A national bestseller and an Amazon Best Book of the Month in the Cookbook/Food & Wine category, now in paperback, A Really Big Lunch collects many of New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison’s essays on food for the first time―and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve. In these pieces, Harrison muses on the relationship between hunter and prey, interrogates the obscure language of wine reviews, and delivers a manifesto against the bland, mass-produced food of our time, proposing instead what he calls the Vivid Diet. He delights in food from the most outré indulgence (a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses) to a simple bowl of menudo. Harrison’s food writing is a program for living, and A Really Big Lunch is shot through with his pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last fifteen years. Lovingly introduced by master chef Mario Batali, A Really Big Lunch is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite. “The collection is chockablock with . . . zingers as well as plenty of half-baked, hilarious theories you can ponder while planning your first summer barbecue.”― The Paris Review