A Children's Book About Beer? Yes, believe it or not — but B Is for Beer is also a book for adults, and bear in mind that it's the work of maverick bestselling novelist Tom Robbins, inter-nationally known for his ability to both seriously illuminate and comically entertain. Once upon a time (right about now) there was a planet (how about this one?) whose inhabitants consumed thirty-six billion gallons of beer each year (it's a fact, you can Google it). Among those affected, each in his or her own way, by all the bubbles, burps, and foam, was a smart, wide-eyed, adventurous kindergartner named Gracie; her distracted mommy; her insensitive dad; her non-conformist uncle; and a magical, butt-kicking intruder from a world within our world. Populated by the aforementioned characters — and as charming as it may be subversive—B Is for Beer involves readers, young and old, in a surprising, far-reaching investigation into the limits of reality, the transformative powers of children, and, of course, the ultimate meaning of a tall, cold brewski

The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all “bursting with dimples and hormones”—and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all. Freedom, its prizes and its prices, is a major theme of Tom Robbins’s classic tale of eccentric adventure. As his robust characters attempt to turn the tables on fate, the reader is drawn along on a tragicomic joyride across the badlands of sexuality, wild rivers of language, and the frontiers of the mind

Jitterbug Perfume is an epic. Which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn't conclude until nine o'clock tonight (Paris time). It is a saga as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle actually is the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon because it is leaking and there is only a drop or two left

The River City emerges as a hot spot for unseemly noir as life, death, and American history mix together into a frightening Southern cocktail

TAMBIÉN LAS VAQUERAS SIENTEN MELANCOLÍA es una visión hilarante de la década del sesenta y principios del setenta en los Estados Unidos. La tragicomedia sienta sus reales en un territorio donde los jóvenes han querido trastocar los valores tradicionales de la sociedad. En medio de un ambiente de hilaridad, sarcasmos e imaginación, nuestra protagonista, Sissy Hankshaw, se convierte en una leyenda viva del autostop. Sus descomunales pulgares le abren las puertas de cuanto vehículo motorizado se apresura por las autopistas, carreteras y caminos del continente norteamericano. Y a su paso, empiezan a aparecer personajes memorables salidos del vasto sueño nacional: allí está Julián, piel roja neoyorkino, pintor abstracto, intelectual, snob, asmático, hipocondríaco; y está el psiquiatra doctor Robbins, el alter ego del autor, enamorado de su paciente – protagonista; y está Delores del Rubi, con su misteriosa leyenda a cuestas y sus botas y su látigo, amante del peyote y de una secreta Revolución Universal; y está Bonanza Jellybean, quien de niña decidió ser vaquera y de mayor negó la absurda posubilidad de que las vaqueras no pudieran existir en el mundo. Y están las grullas chilladoras: el rancho “Rosa de goma”, primer rancho en la historia de la civilización occidental regentado únicamente por mujeres vaqueras; el Pueblo Reloj, la tribu anarquista de pieles rojas que viven a la espera de que resuene su hora en este mundo o en el próximo; y está el Chink, el ermitaño sin par, el antiguru de la montaña sagrada… Los personajes y las situaciones se suceden con el ritmo frenético de nuestro tiempo. El torbellino incesante parece carecer de dirección. Es entonces cuando los personajes (quizás nosotros mismos) se dan cuenta de que la única posibilidad de vida es el retorno a los valores más básicos, menos intelectuales u ortodoxos, es decir, los simples sentimientos humanos. A partir de ellos, se puede volver a respirar sin que la contaminación ambiental y social los disgregue y aniquile. Sissy es la encarnación viviente de estos valores inocentes y eternos. La novela termina siendo una gran alegoría de nuestro tiempo y una visión refrescante del mundo y de la condición humana. “La precisión y la elegancia de la prosa de Robbins nos recuerda a Nabokov, a Borges, a Joyce…” Play Boy

Internationally bestselling novelist and American icon Tom Robbins's long-awaited tale of his wild life and times, both at home and around the globe. Tom Robbins's warm, wise, and wonderfully weird novels — including Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Another Roadside Attraction, and Jitterbug Perfume—provide an entryway into the frontier of his singular imagination. Madcap but sincere, pulsating with strong social and philosophical undercurrents, his irreverent classics have introduced countless readers to hitchhiking cowgirls, born-again monkeys, a philosophizing can of beans, exiled royalty, and problematic redheads. In Tibetan Peach Pie, Robbins turns that unparalleled literary sensibility inward, weaving together stories of his unconventional life — from his Appalachian childhood to his globe-trotting adventures — told in his unique voice, which combines the sweet and sly, the spiritual and earthy. The grandchild of Baptist preachers, Robbins would become, over the course of half a century, a poet interruptus, a soldier, a meteorologist, a radio DJ, an art-critic-turned-psychedelic-journeyman, a world-famous novelist, and a counterculture hero, leading a life as unlikely, magical, and bizarre as those of his quixotic characters. Robbins offers intimate snapshots of Appalachia during the Great Depression, the West Coast during the sixties' psychedelic revolution, international roving before Homeland Security monitored our travels, and New York publishing when it still relied on trees. Written with the big-hearted comedy and mesmerizing linguistic invention for which Robbins is known, Tibetan Peach Pie is an invitation into the private world of a literary legend

Known for his meaty seriocomic novels — expansive works that are simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow — Tom Robbins has also published over the years a number of short pieces, predominantly nonfiction. His travel articles, essays, and tributes to actors, musicians, sex kittens, and thinkers have appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper’s, from Playboy to the New York Times, High Times, and Life. A generous sampling, collected here for the first time and including works as diverse as scholarly art criticism and some decidedly untypical country-music lyrics, Wild Ducks Flying Backward offers a rare sweeping overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original. Whether he is rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso’s Guernica, lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls “the genius waitress,” Robbins’s briefer writings often exhibit the same five traits that perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, a mystical but keenly observant eye, and an irrepressible love of language. Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are a couple of short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an off-beat assessment of our divided nation. And wherever we open Wild Ducks Flying Backward, we’re apt to encounter examples of the intently serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described “romantic Zen hedonist” and “stray dog in the banquet halls of culture.”