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Sign up todaySo the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away
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Learn moreSo the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away is a beautifully written, brooding gem of a novel set in the Pacific Northwest where Brautigan spent most of his childhood.
It is 1979, and a man is recalling the events of his twelfth summer, when he bought bullets for his gun instead of a hamburger. Through the eyes, ears, and voice of Brautigan’s youthful protagonist, the listener is gently led into a small-town tale where the narrator accidentally shoots and kills his best friend. The novel deals with the repercussions of this tragedy and its recurring theme of “what if,” which fuels anguish, regret, and self-blame, as well as some darkly comic passages of bittersweet romance and despair.
Written and published in 1982, this novel foreshadowed Brautigan’s suicide in 1984. Along with An Unfortunate Woman, this is one of the author’s novels that is a fitting epitaph to an author who is a complex, contradictory, and often misunderstood genius.
Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) was a literary idol of the 1960s and 1970s whose comic genius and iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imagination of young people everywhere. He was born and raised in Tacoma, Washington, and moved to San Francisco in the mid-1950s when he became involved in the emerging beat scene. During the 1960s, he became one of the most prominent and prolific writers of the counterculture. Out of this period came some of his most famous works, the best known of which are Trout Fishing in America; his collection of poetry, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster; and his collection of stories, Revenge of the Lawn. Translated the world over, his works helped establish him as one of the most significant American writers of his generation. As his popularity waned towards the end of the 1970s, he became increasingly disillusioned about his work and his life. He committed suicide in 1984. He was the author of eleven novels, ten volumes of poetry, a collection of short stories, and miscellaneous nonfiction pieces, works that often employed parody, satire, and black comedy.
Chris Andrew Ciulla is a versatile performer who has narrated over fifty audiobooks in genres including science fiction, fantasy, thrillers, and romance. He particularly excels at narrating sports-related nonfiction due to being a former sports radio host and a re-occurring sports show guest. In addition to narrating audiobooks, he does frequent film, television, and on-camera commercial work and has also voiced characters for the popular videogames Fallout 4 and Mafia III.
Reviews
“Poetic, gently eccentric, and deeply poignant, the story is a fitting swansong for his life.”
“The verbal humor and zany charm of the book remain quite irresistible.”
“Life is taken back to bare essentials in his books, never more so than here but life is never so rich. If someone ever made a movie of this, good people would watch it a hundred times and never tire of it.”
“Brautigan gets you drunk on similes, knocks you out with exquisite turns of phrase, and leaves you with an ending that hits the entire novel out of the ballpark…Amazing.”
“Sad and tender; and this little sonata on loss, loneliness, death, and nostalgia…is Brautigan’s most appealing work in some time.”
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