Search results for ""Author Bill Barich""

An Angle on the World is a brilliant tribute to Bill Barich's extraordinary range as a writer. Gathering together more than thirty years of work, this book addresses such diverse subjects as a murder trial in the Caribbean, a visit to a juju doctor in Nigeria, and the author's youthful escapades in Italy and the Haight-Ashbury. As the New York Times put it, "An easy, fluid stylist, Barich writes entertainingly about anything."As a staff writer at the New Yorker, Barich found editorial support for his long form dispatches. He makes no pretense of being an objective observer. Instead he's out to capture what Norman Mailer called "the feel of the phenomenon," be it the texture of street life in Belfast or the trails of operating a home for paranoid schizophrenics in San Francisco. He finds heroes in such unlikely places as San Fernando Valley, where former gang members try to prevent teenagers from killing one another in turf wars.The hallmark of An Angle on the World is its compassion. Few writers are as gifted as Barich at making people come alive on the page. His portrait of David Milch, the legendary creator of HBO's Deadwood, offers an inside look at an eccentric genius at work. Here the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia is depicted as a real person, not a rock star cliché. Barich's touch is light, intimate, and acutely aware of our foibles.Whenever he hits the road, whether to London or Barbados, he expresses the sheer joy of being alive. An Angle on the World is an ideal bedside reader, packed with insight, good humor, and razor-sharp prose that has earned Barich his enviable reputation as a writers' writer.

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The land of opportunity, a golden Eden, the last frontier. What is this place that has given rise to countless metaphors but can still quicken the imagination? For Bill Barich, the question became a quest when he realized that home was no longer New York, where he had grown up, but California, to which he had been lured twenty years earlier. Now, in this account of his journey through California, he captures the true nature of the state behind the stereotypes.From the fogbound fishing towns of the North to the Mexican port of entry at San Ysidro, Barich describes an amazing diversity among people who have staked a claim to California’s promise. He introduces us to a Native American hairdresser and the head priest of a Sikh temple; we meet loggers, bikers, an aging lifeguard, and the prison warden whose job is to keep Charles Manson behind bars. He follows the traces of John Muir, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Disney, and Ronald Reagan, and weighs the impact their dreams have had on the rest of us. The result is a book that captures all the promise, heartache, grandeur, and incongruity of California and its unabashed Big Dreams.

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“Witty, knowledgeable, good writing . . . start Barich now and keep reading him.” —Tom McGuaneHere is a travel book with a difference: ten chronological chapters from a year of wandering, from the Pacific Northwest to Tuscany and back again to the trout-laden streams of California. Join Bill Barich as he travels the globe, from the trout streams of Northern California to the auction ring at Saratoga, where millions of dollars may be gaveled away for a yearling thoroughbred; from seedy London pubs to a run-down Florentine palazzo during a glorious Italian spring. Learn the science of English beer brewing, the art of fly tying, how to generate hydroelectric power, the proper analysis of the Daily Racing Form, and the best way to eat artichokes.Freshness, wit, and Barich’s distinctive voice create a luminous travelogue crackling with an inimitable curiosity and an elegance of style that marks every step of this remarkable journey.

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“That autumn, I went a little crazy for rivers.”So writes Bill Barich, and this charming volume captures the essence of obsession. The hours he spent on various streams became a meditation on family, friends, and the natural world. To anyone who remembers the infinite patience of a grandfather on a lake, or the romance of a mountain getaway with a new girlfriend; to anyone who can recall each fish caught on days that were far too hot, or way too cold, or on rivers too crowded, or in canyons too steep; to anyone who has appreciated the trust of an age-old fishing partner, or marveled at the beauty of a leaping trout—to anyone, in fact, who has ever gone a little crazy for rivers, Bill Barich’s wonderful memories of a season on the water and a lifetime of fishing will seem both touching and wise. This little book is a gem.Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for fishermen. Our books for anglers include titles that focus on fly fishing, bait fishing, fly-casting, spin casting, deep sea fishing, and surf fishing. Our books offer both practical advice on tackle, techniques, knots, and more, as well as lyrical prose on fishing for bass, trout, salmon, crappie, baitfish, catfish, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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In his first collection of short fiction, Bill Barich gives us cause to celebrate a prose stylist who can gracefully cross the boundaries of genre. As stated by Anne Tyler, Hard to Be Good is so large and complete that you tend to look up at the end and find yourself surprised that it’s still the same day.Set in the American West, as are three other of the seven stories in this book, it is about the unselfconscious struggle for wholeness in a divided family. Its adolescent protagonist moves from innocence to experience in the course of a summer vacation with his mother and her third husband, and the result is satisfying, rather than harrowing.The attempt to make signification relationships cohere, to weather the transformation of innocence, informs all the stories in this book, and in Barich’s worlds the outcome is often good—knowledge does not always lead to hopelessness. Highly disparate mothers covering on a couple in Idaho Falls (“Where the Mountains Are”) have much to teach and learn, a nineteen-year-old American studying in Florence accepts the surprising human complications of an outsider’s great pensione adventure (“Caravaggio”) . . . and that’s just a few of Barich’s brilliant stories.Hard to Be Good is a book of real feeling, breadth, and narrative movement. As Frederick Exley wrote, “Barich is a splendidly gifted writer.”Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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From one of California’s most celebrated writers comes a generous and deeply absorbing novel, as filled with warmth and the hope of second chances as the land it describes.Returning from New York to the vineyards of Northern California to be with her dying mother, Anna Torelli never expects that the trip will change her life. But when she meets Arthur Atwater, he father’s vineyard manager—a man as emotionally bruised and as fiercely independent as she is—Anna is pulled back into the rhythms of the growing season, into the radiant landscape of her childhood, and into a love affair that rouses her as nothing has before. Carson Valley is also home to Anna’s aging father, Victor, the son of Italian immigrants who first planted the vineyard in the 1890s, and his foreman, Antonio Lopez, a Mexican immigrant whose marital troubles deepen when his cousin Omar Perez crosses the border illegally to work the vineyard harvest.Carson Valley is a masterful work of social realism—as insightful about modern love as it is about rural life in the grip of change.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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