Synopses & Reviews
Here, in nine stunning pieces, Larry Brown aims for nothing short of ruthlessly capturing the truth of the geography that shaped him and his art. He tells what it's like to be constantly compared with William Faulkner, a writer whom he shares the undeniable inspiration of the Mississippi land.
Here is the pond Larry reclaims and restocks on his place in Tula. Here is the Oxford bar crowd on a wild goose chase to a fabled fishing event. Here is the literary sensation trying to outsmart a wily coyote intent on killing the farm's baby goats. And here, overlooking the pond, is the writing cabin built with the writer's own hands. Woven in are intimate reflections on the Southern musicians and writers whose work has inspired Brown's and the thrill of his first literary recognition.
But the centerpiece of this book is the long title essay, which embodies every element of Larry Brown's most emotional attachments to the family, the land, the animals. It is a beautiful and important expression of the mysterious sources of a writer's motivation. This is an invaluable book for every reader interested in how a great writer responds, both personally and artistically, to the patch of land he lives on.
Review
"He's an ex-Marine and ex-fireman, a writer without gimmick who happens to possess a prodigious natural talent....He's one of the best we have." Washington Post Book World
Review
"Larry Brown is the son of a Mississippi sharecropper and despite all his forays into the rarefied sphere of liteary publishing somehow looks it. He often wears an expression of achy worry, like a farmer staring into a dusty sun, wanting for rain...Beckett said the true artist comes from nowhere, but Larry...strikes me as the profound exception: Man and place are inextricably entwined within him....The old saw about being able to take the boy out of the country but not the country out of the boy applies here in a very serious and literal way." Jonathan Miles
Synopsis
Brown will show you another America - his America - and dare you to try again to forget that it still exists. - USA Today
"Brown writes like a boxer - economical, crisp, wounding." - Men's Journal
"He's an ex-Marine and ex-fireman, a writer without gimmick who happens to possess a prodigious natural talentT He's one of the best we have." - Washington Post Book World
About the Author
Larry Brown was born in Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he lived all his life. At the age of thirty, a captain in the Oxford Fire Department, he decided to become a writer and worked toward that goal for seven years before publishing his first book, Facing the Music, a collection of stories, in 1988. With the publication of his first novel, Dirty Work, he quit the fire station in order to write fulltime. Between then and his untimely death in 2004, he published seven more books. His three grown children and his widow, Mary Annie Brown, live near Oxford.
Table of Contents
Prologue (1)
By the Pond (7)
Thicker than Blood (13)
Harry Crews:
Mento and Friend (17)
Chattanooga Nights (29)
Billy Ray's Farm (39)
Fishing with Charlie (85)
So Much Fish, So Close to Home
An Improv (95)
The Whore in Me (145)
Goatsongs (155)
Shack (173)