Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Tom Robbins's cult masterpiece of countercultural imagination and linguistic jazz. This 1976 paperback introduced Sissy Hankshaw, born with enormous thumbs that make her the greatest hitchhiker in America, into the pantheon of unforgettable literary characters. Robbins spins a tale that careens from the Rubber Rose Ranch - where militant cowgirls defend a flock of whooping cranes - to the Dakota Badlands, mixing sexual politics, ecological awakening, and anarchic humor into something wholly original.

Published as the '60s counterculture fragmented, the novel insists on playfulness and possibility over ideology. Robbins's prose refuses to behave: it philosophizes, riffs, makes terrible puns, and suddenly achieves genuine beauty. The book became a talisman for readers who rejected both straight society and the New Left's humorless seriousness. Decades before "weird" became a marketing category, Robbins proved American fiction could be simultaneously literary and deliriously fun. Essential for anyone who believes novels should celebrate rather than merely document life.