"I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer is the memoir of Nichols' extraordinary life, as seen through the lens of his writing. Everything that went into making him a writer and eventually found an outlet in his work -- his education, family, wives, children, friends, enemies, politics, and place -- is told from the point of view of his daily practice of writing. Beginning with his first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo, published in 1965 when he was...

Diverse and sometimes controversial essays that redefine the concept of stewardship by exploring the fine line between interacting and interfering with nature.

When eighteen-year-old Jerry Payne first meets Pookie Adams at the Friarsburg, Oklahoma, bus depot, he is hardly aware that this moment marks the beginning of the most memorable love affair of his life. Overwhelmed (and yet secretly enchanted) by her zany, rambling monologue, Jerry is relieved to leave her in St. Louis as he continues to New York. Thinking he's seen the last of her, he heads off to college, only to be pursued by seventeen lengthy...

On the surface this book spins a fisherman's tall tale about a ribald angling contest between three middle-aged friends who love (and perhaps hate) each other: a preppy trilingual Machiavelli, an intellectual ghetto pool shark, and a brawny Texan who defies his own macho stereotype. All professional writers, the men have met every autumn for eighteen years at the Big Arsenic Springs on the Río Grande to fly-cast for trout and argue about life, literature,...