Jim Harrison

The author of Dalva and Legends of the Fall has created three stunning novellas that echo the best works of Raymond Carver and James Dickey. A superb collection that evokes life lived close to the land--and a brilliant portrayal of the complex relationships of the men and women there.

The Woman Lit by Fireflies

Kat Albanese

When I was a kid I used to have nightmares about the electric chair. I told my granddad who was the only one I could actually talk to at the time. He said if you're going to spend your life worrying about the electric chair you’ve already been electrocuted.

Reality is perceptual and consensual and after thirty days alone you could forget where your skin left off and the world began. Then you emerged for supplies and forgot how to behave partly because you never really knew how in the first place.

💛 loved these novellas in ascending progression. or rather i loved the last of the three, enjoyed the second, and was entertained by the first. the first of jim’s fiction that i’ve read after reading and loving much of his poetry. 

his writing feels like home and a witted runway for imaginative thinking. can’t wait to get into more.

💛 loved these novellas in ascending progression. or rather i loved the last of the three, enjoyed the second, and was entertained by the first. the first of jim’s fiction that i’ve read after reading and loving much of his poetry. 

his writing feels like home and a witted runway for imaginative thinking. can’t wait to get into more.

Eric Kettunen

Jim Willis

Three novellas by the author of Legends of the Fall. “A brilliant tour de force . . . Jim Harrison at his peak: comic, erotic, and insightful” (San Francisco Chronicle). Across the odd contours of the American landscape, people are searching for the things that aren’t irretrievably lost, for the incandescent beneath the ordinary. An ex-Bible student with raucously asocial tendencies rescues the preserved body of an Indian chief from the frigid depths of Lake Superior in a caper that nets a wildly unexpected bounty. A band of sixties radicals, now approaching middle age, reunite to free an old comrade from a Mexican jail. A fifty-year-old suburban housewife flees quietly from her abusive businessman husband at a highway rest stop, climbs a fence, and explores the bittersweet pageant of the preceding years within the sanctuary of an Iowa cornfield. The Woman Lit by Fireflies is the work of a classic writer at the very top of his form—a hard-living, hard-writing hero of American letters whose novellas comprise a sweeping tribute to the nation’s heartland and the colorful, courageous characters who inhabit it. “Funny, wild, sexy, and bizarre . . . Along with Richard Ford . . . Harrison has cornered the market in the tough-but-tender style that characterized Hemingway’s early work.” —Nick Hornby

The Woman Lit by Fireflies

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