Torpedo is a 4x a year literary journal / magazine / printed object / whatever we call them these days.

The most recent edition is dedicated to Richard Brautigan. His daughter, Ianthe, wrote the intro and was involved in selecting contributor pieces. The magazine contains works of Richard’s (stories from Revenge of the Lawn, excepts from In Watermelon Sugar, Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General from Big Sur and others)

The Book Show is a radio program from Radio National / Australian Broadcasting Corp and last week’s (April 20 2009) show featured Torpedo in ‘Fishing for Richard Brautigan’.

The show features a brief interview with Ianthe Brautigan. The majority of the program is talking to the the founder/editor of Torpedo and contributors of the latest issue of torpedo

probably the most interesting thing (IMO) is ianthe’s quote regarding not feeling like she needs to protect her dad anymore.

she also briefly talks about teaching ‘trout fishing in america’ to one of her classes. how cool would it be to be in one of those classes!

there’s a lovely interview with ianthe brautigan about writing, being an author and her dad’s writing- here

Gretchen at the happiness project has posted ‘i was trying to describe you to someone‘. she talks about using the poem at her wedding. and then a convo re: copyright occurs in the comments

it’s always nice to see something about brautigan in press. on the supposed anniversary of richard taking his own life, ben myers of the guardian uk books blog writes what could be called an intro to brautigan .

rob has written a fantastic review of john barber’s new book: Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings And Life.

amazon has it in stock if you’re looking for an xmas present…

make sure you check out some of richard’s halloween poems.

happy halloween!!!!

jack from ny recently emailed me about Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate by steven bach. bach was the head of production at United Artists from 1978-1981 and was the executive in charge of the movie.

jack said the book mentions there was an attempt in the late 1970s to make ‘the hawkline monster’ into a movie starring clint eastwood AND jack nicholson. how amazingly cool would that have been!?!

for those of you looking for some samples of brautigan’s work, check out google books. there is a very limited selection of readings available.

the combo book of trout fishing in america, the pill vs the springhill mine disaster & in watermelon sugar.

another 3 book combo confederategeneral from big sur, dreaming of babylon & the hawkline monster

fyi, there’s some new works from some of the folks on the mailing list on the by fans page.

here’s one of my favourite quotes about brautigan. this is from bruce cook of the national observer and located on the back cover of the hawkline monster: a gothic western.

no writer you can think of is quite like him today, nor was any writer anytime – unless you can imagine the kind of things mark twain might have written had he wandered into a field of ripe cannabis with a pack of zig zag papers in his pocket. that’s about as close as i can come to brautigan, a kind of cracker-barrel surrealist whose humor is essentially nineteenth-century western american.