The River City emerges as a hot spot for unseemly noir as life, death, and American history mix together into a frightening Southern cocktail.

The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all “bursting with dimples and hormones”—and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all. Freedom, its prizes and its prices, is a major theme of Tom Robbins’s classic tale of eccentric adventure. As his robust characters attempt to turn the tables on fate, the reader is drawn along on a tragicomic joyride across the badlands of sexuality, wild rivers of language, and the frontiers of the mind.

Jitterbug Perfume is an epic. Which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn't conclude until nine o'clock tonight (Paris time). It is a saga as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle actually is the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon because it is leaking and there is only a drop or two left.

Known for his meaty seriocomic novels — expansive works that are simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow — Tom Robbins has also published over the years a number of short pieces, predominantly nonfiction. His travel articles, essays, and tributes to actors, musicians, sex kittens, and thinkers have appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper’s, from Playboy to the New York Times, High Times, and Life. A generous sampling, collected here for the first time and including works as diverse as scholarly art criticism and some decidedly untypical country-music lyrics, Wild Ducks Flying Backward offers a rare sweeping overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original. ...

Internationally bestselling novelist and American icon Tom Robbins's long-awaited tale of his wild life and times, both at home and around the globe. Tom Robbins's warm, wise, and wonderfully weird novels — including Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Another Roadside Attraction, and Jitterbug Perfume—provide an entryway into the frontier of his singular imagination. Madcap but sincere, pulsating with strong social and philosophical undercurrents, his irreverent classics have introduced countless readers to hitchhiking cowgirls, born-again monkeys, a philosophizing can of beans, exiled royalty, and problematic redheads. In Tibetan Peach Pie, Robbins turns that unparalleled literary...

A Children's Book About Beer? Yes, believe it or not — but B Is for Beer is also a book for adults, and bear in mind that it's the work of maverick bestselling novelist Tom Robbins, inter-nationally known for his ability to both seriously illuminate and comically entertain. Once upon a time (right about now) there was a planet (how about this one?) whose inhabitants consumed thirty-six billion gallons of beer each year (it's a fact, you can Google it). Among those affected, each in his or her own way, by all the bubbles, burps, and foam, was a smart, wide-eyed, adventurous kindergartner named Gracie; her distracted mommy; her insensitive dad; her non-conformist uncle; and a magical,...

Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government; a pacifist who carries a gun; a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy; a cyberwhiz who hates computers; a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior). Yet there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Switters. He doesn’t merely pack a pistol. He is a pistol. And as we dog Switters’s strangely elevated heels across four continents, in and out of love and danger, discovering in the process the “true” Third Secret of Fatima, we experience Tom Robbins—that fearless storyteller,...

TAMBIÉN LAS VAQUERAS SIENTEN MELANCOLÍA es una visión hilarante de la década del sesenta y principios del setenta en los Estados Unidos. La tragicomedia sienta sus reales en un territorio donde los jóvenes han querido trastocar los valores tradicionales de la sociedad. En medio de un ambiente de hilaridad, sarcasmos e imaginación, nuestra protagonista, Sissy Hankshaw, se convierte en una leyenda viva del autostop. Sus descomunales pulgares le abren las puertas de cuanto vehículo motorizado se apresura por las autopistas, carreteras y caminos del continente norteamericano. Y a su paso, empiezan a aparecer personajes memorables salidos del vasto sueño nacional: allí está Julián, piel roja...

Книга знаковая для творческой биографии Тома Роббинса – писателя, официально признанного «национальным достоянием американской контркультуры». Ироническая притча? Причудливая фантасмагория? Просто умная и оригинальная «сказка для взрослых», наполненная невероятным количеством отсылок к литературным, музыкальным и кинематографическим шедеврам «бурных шестидесятых»? Почему этот роман сравнивали с произведениями Воннегута и Бротигана и одновременно с «Чужим в чужой стране» Хайнлайна? Просто объяснить это невозможно…

Официально признанный «национальным достоянием американской контркультуры» Том Роббинс вызвал этим романом в 2000 грандиозный скандал, ибо посягнул на святое – классические штампы этой самой контркультуры! Агент секретной службы, который в душе был и остается анархистом… Шаманы языческих племен, налагающие на несчастных белых интеллектуалов странные табу… Путешествие на индейской пироге, расширяющее сознание и открывающее путь в иную реальность… То, что вытворяет с этими нонконформистскими канонами Том Роббинс, описать невозможно! (Такого грандиозного издевательства над «кастанедовскими» штампами еще не было…)