Still Life With Wood Pecker
by Tom Robbins
$ 55
Still Life with Woodpecker is a playful, philosophical love story that follows Princess Leigh-Cheri, a disillusioned royal who flees her prescribed life, and Bernard Mickey Wrangle, an outlaw bomber obsessed with redheads, as they collide in a narrative that blends romance, political satire, and metaphysical inquiry. Written in the late 1970s and published in 1980, the novel reflects the Pacific Northwest’s post–counterculture moment, when the region had become a refuge for dropouts, anarchists, artists, and seekers suspicious of authority and mass consumer culture—an ethos Robbins both embodied and amplified. Though the story roams globally, its sensibility is distinctly Northwest: anti-corporate, nature-aware, irreverent toward power, and invested in the possibility that personal freedom and ecstatic love might exist outside mainstream American gravity, making the book feel less like a product of its time than a transmission from a rain-soaked, eccentric edge of the country where utopian ideas were still being seriously, if mischievously, tested.