Jim Harrison. 
 
W.H. Allen: 1975. First British edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Octavo. Shelf wear along the top and bottom of the jacket. A little foxing on the inner folds and trace foxing on the inside panels. Minor soiling on the front panels of the jacket. Shelf wear along the top and bottom of the boards. A little foxing on the edges of the text block. Minor soiling on the endpapers and a former owner's name small and in ink on a preliminary leaf. One page folded from a dog ear. Else clean. 176 pages. Very good. 
 
A dam is being built in the Grand Canyon. Poets are devoted fishermen. Road trips are divine missions of destruction (blow up the dam). Beautiful girls with long legs are in love. Harrison's novels - A Good Day to Die's his second - could have just been larger than life American adventures. But always alongside the wildness is the bristly sorrow of life. For that, we don't just read him. We love him. 
 
"I hadn't envied the sailor. I didn't like the idea of dropping speed with alcohol in my guts. Blood pressure soars. I looked at my watch - only nine o'clock - and remembered how much I had always disliked people who copped out on a good drunk. You would just get started talking and laughing and playing pool and they would go home to their wives. Pussy-whipped we called it. I couldn't go home to my wife. Six months now."