Verlyn Klinkenborg – författare

Verlyn Klinkenborg's The Last Fine Time sensitively chronicles the life of a family-owned restaurant in Buffalo, New York, from its days before WWII as a Polish tavern to 1947, when it became a swank nightspot serving highballs and Frenchfried shrimp to a generation of servicemen. In the inevitable disappearance of George & Eddie's, as narrated by Klinkenborg, we see the passing of both an Old World way of life and the end of the postwar exuberance that was Eddie Wenzek's "last fine time." A loving portrait of an era and place, The Last Fine Time is, by turns, an elegy, a celebration, a social history, and a tour de force of lyrical style.

Upriver and Downstream gathers seventy columns about fishing—from freshwater to saltwater, from small ponds to the Great Lakes, from the Pacific Northwest to post-Soviet Russia—written for the “Outdoors” column of the New York Times. Contributors include such celebrated names as Nick Lyons, Thomas McGuane, Nelson Bryant, Peter Kaminsky, Ernest Schweibert, and Robert H. Boyle. Short, evocative, informative, and entertaining, here are pieces about fly-fishing for wild brook trout, bait-fishing for striped bass, casting into tailwaters, or angling in midwinter. The settings range from Hudson River piers to the Florida Everglades, from Iceland to the Amazon, and the fish include everything from the common sunfish to the esoteric paddlefish. These engaging essays remind us of what fishing is all about: companionship and solitude, challenge and relaxation, nature and technology, from coast-to-coast to around the globe.Rich with the particulars of water, light, and air, as well as a keen awareness of, as Verlyn Klinkenborg puts it in his introduction, “what is happening out there—in the deep, in the shallows, at the end of the line,” these reflections and recollections beautifully capture the natural world and one of life’s most challenging, perennial pursuits.From the Hardcover edition.

Most of what you think you know about writing is useless. It’s the harmful debris of your education—a mixture of half-truths, myths, and false assumptions that prevents you from writing well. Drawing on years of experience as a writer and teacher of writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg offers an approach to writing that will change the way you work and think. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. What you’ll find here isn’t the way to write. Instead, you’ll find a way to clear your mind of illusions about writing and discover how you write. Several Short Sentences About Writing is a book of first steps and experiments. They will revolutionize the way you think and perceive, and they will change forever the sense of your own authority as a writer. This is a book full of learning, but it’s also a book full of unlearning—a way to recover the vivid, rhythmic, poetic sense of language you once possessed. An indispensable and unique book that will give you a clear understanding of how to think about what you do when you write and how to improve the quality of your writing.

The hugely admired author of "The Last Fine Time" preserves and makes new the sights, smells, sounds, and poetry of country living. Klinkenborg reveals the beauty of the American landscape, not from a scenic overlook, but through a screened-in porch or from the window of a pickup driving down an empty highway in the teeth of an approaching storm.

The hugely admired author of "The Last Fine Time" preserves and makes new the sights, smells, sounds, and poetry of country living. Klinkenborg reveals the beauty of the American landscape, not from a scenic overlook, but through a screened-in porch or from the window of a pickup driving down an empty highway in the teeth of an approaching storm.

"Making Hay takes one of the least common denominators in rural American life and gives it real glory. Klinkenborg is funny, learned, elegant, and accurate every single minute."--Thomas McGuane“Klinkenborg is our modern Thoreau.”—Tom Brokaw"A marvelous picture of rural life and of families at work. This is a fascinating excursion into American farmland."--Publishers WeeklyFrom the wonders of alfalfa, the "miracle plant," to barbed wire and the myriad difficulties of operating tractors and side rakes, renowned author Verlyn Klinkenborg paints a stunning and memorable portrait of life on American family farms.Making Hay gives an unforgettable glimpse of everyday life on the farms of Iowa, Minnesota, and Montana. In beautiful, deceptively simple prose touched with humor and affection, Klinkenborg evokes a way of life at risk, and weaves a marvelous story of the richness of rural living.