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The Summer He Didn’t Die is Jim Harrison’s fifth collection of novellas (The Legends of the Fall was his second). The novella is a form not often found in contemporary American fiction, falling between the safe marketing harbors of the novel and the short story collection. But it is a form that lends itself to Harrison’s prodigious storytelling gifts—the rich, encompassing descriptive sense of a novel, and the brevity and wit of a shorter work. Harrison, an esteemed poet, novelist, short story writer, memoirist, essayist, and journalist, is the prolific and unexcelled master of the contemporary novella.

—Lacy Crawford