The English MajorFrom the New York Times–bestselling author of Legends of the Fall: “Harrison spins the common chaff of a road trip into gold” (Tim McNulty, The Seattle Times). “It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn’t.” With these words, Jim Harrison begins a riotous, moving novel that sends a sixty-something man, divorced and robbed of his farm by a late-blooming real estate shark of an ex-wife, on a road trip across America. Cliff is armed with a childhood puzzle of the United States and a mission to rename all the states and state birds, the latter of which have been unjustly saddled with white men’s banal monikers up until now. His adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student from his high-school-teacher days twenty-some years before, to a “snake farm” in Arizona owned by an old classmate, and to the high-octane existence of his son, a big-time movie producer who has just bought an apartment over the Presidio in San Francisco. Jim Harrison’s riotous and moving cross-country novel, The English Major, is the map of a man’s journey into, and out of, himself. It is vintage Harrison—reflective, big-picture American, and replete with wicked wit. “The English Major is to midlife crisis what The Catcher in the Rye is to adolescence.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times |
Contents
Section 16 | 120 |
Section 17 | 128 |
Section 18 | 143 |
Section 19 | 150 |
Section 20 | 157 |
Section 21 | 164 |
Section 22 | 172 |
Section 23 | 179 |
Section 9 | 60 |
Section 10 | 68 |
Section 11 | 74 |
Section 12 | 81 |
Section 13 | 89 |
Section 14 | 105 |
Section 15 | 113 |
Section 24 | 186 |
Section 25 | 216 |
Section 26 | 232 |
Section 27 | 239 |
Section 28 | 247 |
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Common terms and phrases
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