Trout Fishing in America is not only the title of the first of these three works, but also the name of a character within the novella as well as a metaphor for the spiritual quest for the pure and authentic truth that lies at the book's heart. Devoid of the conventional devices of plot such as conflict, character development, crisis, and resolution, the story unfolds in an episodic manner of seemingly unrelated events that the author connects as if by coincidence or indirection. Its genre closely resembles the picaresque novel that traces its roots through Jack Kerouac's On the Road as far back as Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The story coheres as a kind of road novel that explores inner and outer realities in search of the real, as juxtaposed with the plastic, the generic, the mass-produced emptiness of modern western civilization, brilliantly parodied by the pop artist Andy Warhol.

The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster is a collection of poetry, each with one short prose paragraph, seemingly disconnected except as related to each other in Richard Brautigan's mind. The title refers to the loss of life in a mining accident compared to the loss of potential lives by use of the contraceptive pill.

In Watermelon Sugar is a series of short prose sketches that qualify neither as short stories nor a novel in the conventional sense. They most resemble dispatches or brief accounts of events and people living near the Watermelon Works. In this imaginary world characters live and breathe as metaphysical beings as well as three-dimensional, flesh and blood creatures. In this hallucinatory state, the reader is given a literary taste of how perceptions and behavior can be altered by the metaphor as well as by drug-like experiences.

It is easy to see how Richard Brautigan's work both mirrored and evoked the consciousness of the 1960s with its non-violent as well as violent changes that had many people wondering whether there was any center in American life.