Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Hard Scrabble : Observations on a Patch of Land
ISBN: 9781477309605
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / University of Texas Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Literature;

The two-time National Book Award finalist and author of Goodbye to a River ruminates over what an "unmagnificent" Texas homestead has meant to him.

"A kind of homemade book--imperfect like a handmade thing, a prize. It's a galloping, spontaneous book, on occasion within whooping distance of that greatest and sweetest of country books, Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Notebook ." --Edward Hoagland, The New York Times Book Review

"His subjects are trees and brush, hired help, fences, soil, armadillos and other wildlife, flood and drought, local history, sheep and goats . . . and they come to us reshaped and reenlivened by his agreeably individual (and sometimes cranky) notions." -- The New Yorker

"If Goodbye to a River was in some sense Graves's Odyssey , this book is his [version of Hesiod's] Works and Days . It is partly a book about work, partly a book about nature, but mostly a book about belonging. In the end John Graves has learned to belong to his patch of land so thoroughly that at moments he can sense in himself a unity with medieval peasants and Sumerian farmers, working with their fields by the Tigris." --Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post Book World

" Hard Scrabble is hard pastoral of the kind we have learned to recognize in Wordsworth, Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It celebrates life in accommodation with a piece of the 'given' creation, a recalcitrant four hundred or so acres of Texas cedar brake, old field, and creek bottom, which will require of any genuine resident all the character he can muster." -- Southwest Review