Revenge of the Lawn

Richard Brautigan Revenge of the Lawn (1971)
This is an odd one, a collection of Brautigan's short stories, except as with the two or three page chapters which constitute most of his novels, they're so short as to amount to what may as well be considered poetry in prose form - pithy thumbnail snapshots of Brautigan's daily existence in San Franciso but, in this case, without any particular overarching narrative theme beyond having come from the same guy. Some of them are wonderful and none of them are of a length conducive to outstaying their welcome, but the whole never quite adds up to the sort of thing you find with the novels. Occasionally there's something great and yet so brief it can be quoted in full right here, The Scarlatti Tilt, for example.

'It's very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who's learning to play the violin.' That's what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.

Mostly, it's a satisfying collection peppered with the usual astonishing morsels of deceptively simple profundity which cement the legend of Brautigan as never having quite slotted into any literary tradition excepting perhaps his own.