Brown Dog is a living, breathing, riveting character, flawed and compelling as all get out. He is also our animal nature and the art that makes us human, which isn’t to say that he rises above that nature, because there is no distinction. We are of our world. BD adventures through the woods of Michigan and the wilds of Los Angeles, eating, drinking and flirting. Harrison is, quite literally, a poet, which doesn’t get in the way. It just means that his words have extraordinary power. In the case of Brown Dog, instead of the description “Collected Novellas”, we should use that old fashioned label, “A Treasury”.
New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison is one of America's most beloved writers, and of all his creations, Brown Dog-a bawdy, reckless, down-on-his-luck Michigan Indian-has earned cult status with readers in the more than two decades since his first appearance. For the first time, Brown Dog gathers all the Brown Dog novellas, including one never before published, into one volume-the ideal introduction (or reintroduction) to Harrison's irresistible Everyman.
In these novellas, BD rescues the preserved body of an Indian from Lake Superior's cold waters; overindulges in food, drink, and women while just scraping by in Michigan's Upper Peninsula; wanders Los Angeles in search of an ersatz Native activist who stole his bearskin; adopts two Native children; and flees the authorities then returns across the Canadian border aboard an Indian rock band's tour bus. The collection culminates with He Dog, never before published, which finds BD marginally employed and still looking for love (or sometimes just a few beers and a roll in the hay) as he goes on a road trip from Michigan to Montana and back, arriving home to the prospect of family stability, and, perhaps, a chance at redemption.
Brown Dog underscores Harrison's place as one of America's most irrepressible writers and one of the finest practitioners of the novella form.
