{"product_id":"hardscrabble-book-john-graves-9780932012760","title":"Hardscrabble","description":"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, New York Times Book ReviewHis 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.--New YorkerIf 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, Washington Post Book WorldHard 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","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50097061789969,"sku":"CIN0932012760VG","price":11.19,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52155568750865,"sku":"CIN0932012760G","price":8.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":54679260397841,"sku":"CIN0932012760A","price":9.62,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0932012760.jpg?v=1750948175","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/hardscrabble-book-john-graves-9780932012760","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}