Bill Barich: 11 books

“In Traveling Light [Barich] simply does it—goes fishing, goes to the races, goes to Europe. He dramatizes his restlessness without gathering wool” (The New York Times).   Here is a travel book with a difference: ten chronological chapters from a year of wandering, from the Pacific Northwest...

An “artful and compassionate” collection of personal essays, travel writing, dispatches, and book reviews from the author of Laughing in the Hills (Time). An Angle on the World is a brilliant tribute to Bill Barich’s extraordinary range as a writer. Gathering together more than thirty...

After meeting an Irishwoman in London and moving to Dublin, Bill Barich?a “blow-in,” or stranger, in Irish parlance?found himself looking for a traditional Irish pub to be his local. There are nearly 12,000 pubs in Ireland, so he appeared to have plenty of choices. He wanted a pub like the one...

In his first collection of short fiction, Bill Barich gives us cause to celebrate a prose stylist who can gracefully cross the boundaries of genre. As stated by Anne Tyler, Hard to Be Good is so large and complete that you tend to look up at the end and find yourself surprised that it’s still the...

From the author of A Pint of Plain and Traveling Light. “In his first novel, Bill Barich delivers a seasoned performance” (The New York Times Book Review). From one of California’s most celebrated writers comes a generous and deeply absorbing novel, as filled with warmth and the hope...

Bill Barich’s widely praised work is at its peak in these intimate glimpses into the stories behind the stories, the real people behind the public façade of the athletic realm. In this collection, Barich takes readers behind the scenes of both participatory and spectator sports, whose wide variety...

Twenty-five years after his racetrack classic Laughing in the Hills, Bill Barich tells the story of how he fell in love and found a new life in Dublin, where he was soon caught up in the Irish obsession with horses and luck. Barich travels throughout his adopted country and meets the leading trainers...

“That autumn, I went a little crazy for rivers.” So writes Bill Barich, and this charming volume captures the essence of obsession. The hours he spent on various streams became a meditation on family, friends, and the natural world. To anyone who remembers the infinite patience of a grandfather...

The land of opportunity, a golden Eden, the last frontier. What is this place that has given rise to countless metaphors but can still quicken the imagination? For Bill Barich, the question became a quest when he realized that home was no longer New York, where he had grown up, but California, to...

“We do not take a trip; a trip takes us,” John Steinbeck noted in his 1962 classic, Travels with Charley. In 2008, Bill Barich decided to explore the mood of the United States as Steinbeck had done almost a half century before. He set off on a 5,943 mile cross-country drive from New York to his...

Bill Barich burst onto the literary scene more than twenty-five years ago with this remarkable account of racetrack life. Holed up in a cheap motel in Albany, California, only a few miles from Golden Gate Fields, he looked to the track to help him make sense of his life during a dark peiod of loss...