I discovered the work of Richard Brautigan in the back seat of a friend's car in Los Angeles. That was fifteen years ago. At the time, I was in my early thirties. I'd quit my life in New York and was moving to Europe. Of course, I didn't know anybody over there, nor did I speak European. No matter. My life had been fairly predictable up until that point - finished high school, went to college, got a job, and so on. It's not that it wasn't a fortunate set of circumstances, it's just that I wanted off the American treadmill of predictability. If I had to watch one more of my friends get married and have kids I was going to poke out my eyes. When I saw that mysterious cover of In Watermelon Sugar on the back seat, it was like a compass pointing me in the direction of an unknown universe. Brautigan's work often contains the wisdom of an alien life form from the future. I'd never heard of Brautigan, but even after reading a few sentences, I knew I wanted to spend more time on his planet. His work was like making a new friend that felt like an old friend. His work continues to have a timeless feeling about it. It doesn't matter that he blew his own brains out in 1984 at the age of forty-nine. He is very much alive in these books he left behind. The book that made him famous, Trout Fishing in America, is still more or less unreadable to me, but many of his other novels and poems are among my favorite works of literature. "Xerox Candy Bar" and "My Nose Is Growing Old" are standouts that do not partake in more conventional forms of poetry with the flowery bullshit that so often is thought of as a wonderful use of language.
-Joshua Abelow