Now we will fly new banners from the castle, and they will be of your own choosing.

Aww...this is an endearing collection. Made me happy and warm and enthusiastic, made me smile like listening to Nashville Skyline or the Fucking Champs or jumping into a covert soulja boy in my cloistered file room and want to snuggle up against the Pacific Northwest and gave me dreams of being proposed to by a beautiful musician with six fingers on each hand and healed my heart. I will likely reread this again sometime. ( )

I have been wanting to read something by Richard Brautigan for several years. I had heard quite a bit about him and his writing. I was looking forward to the experience with anticipation. I was disappointed, though, by this collection. I see that many Goodreads users love these stories, and I really liked some of them, but the ones I really liked tended to be longer than the average. In general, these short stories are very short; in my edition, sixty-two stories in approximately 146 pages.

Many of the stories, regardless of their length, did not feel like stories to me. I have always loved short stories for their spareness. The ability of the author to develop characters and plot in only a few words, paragraphs or pages. Many of the stories in this collection, though, felt like vignettes, lacking either characters, plot, or the development of one of the two or both. I felt similarly about the stories of Ann Hempel and know I differed there as well from many Goodreads users.

This collection by Brautigan does include some brilliant insights, very colorful and sometimes bizarre analogies and metaphors and prose that is an example of what is crisp and spare. I thought the title story, Revenge of the Lawn, with which the collection begins, was excellent. I am looking forward to trying one of his Brautigan’s novels soon, to see if I feel differently about that. ( )

Heaven is full of books like this.

"Why were we tossed this way together as if we were nothing but a weird salad served on the seats of a God-damn bus?" ( )

Good writing and storytelling, shame about the objectification of women - left a sad taste in my mouth. ( )

Zowel het beste als het slechtste van Brautigan. Heel wat van deze verhalen zijn te vrijblijvend, amper uitgewerkt, te gemakzuchtig. Andere verhalen tonen een literaire koorddanser, een jongleur van taal, verbeelding en verwondering of doen denken aan (een dromerige) Bukowski. ( )