My Review of Jim Harrison's "Brown Dog" in the Dallas Morning News

So I’ve been woefully out-of-touch with my blog, my misbegotten red-headed stepchild (with apologies to all ginger stepchildren in the world), but I haven’t been woefully out-of-touch with reading & living, which should always trump blogging. My review of Jim Harrison’s collection of six novellas in one volume, Brown Dog (found here, in the Dallas Morning News), is high-spirited, if cut short somewhat by the brevity of the DMN review format—the first draft of this review was over 1,000 words, and the suggested length of their reviews is 600 words. As for the novellas, most have been previously published, except for the final novella, “He Dog,” which is new. Harrison is a phenomenal writer, one of those force-of-nature writers, who deserve to be read and reread. I went through a Jim Harrison phase years ago, when I stumbled upon him as a kind of bawdy, modern-day Ernest Hemingway, and I still think of him that way. He’s like Pete Dexter’s gourmand cousin. He’s confessed to counting birds throughout his life, which makes me like him off the bat, but is perhaps most famous for Legends of the Fall, a book of three novellas that scored some kind of literary trifecta when each separate novella was made into a film.