Larry Brown

“Brilliant . . . Larry Brown has slapped his own fresh tattoo on the big right arm of Southern Lit.” —The Washington Post Book World Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage, directed by David Gordon Green. Joe Ransom is a hard-drinking ex-con pushing fifty who just won’t slow down--not in his pickup, not with a gun, and certainly not with women. Gary Jones estimates his own age to be about fifteen. Born luckless, he is the son of a hopeless, homeless wandering family, and he’s desperate for a way out. When their paths cross, Joe offers him a chance just as his own chances have dwindled to almost nothing. Together they follow a twisting map to redemption--or ruin.

Dirty Work is the story of two men, strangersÑone white, the other black. Both were born and raised in Mississippi. Both fought in Vietnam. Both were gravely wounded. Now, twenty-two years later, the two men lie in adjacent beds in a VA hospital.Over the course of a day and a night, Walter James and Braiden Chaney talk of memories, of passions, of fate. With great vision, humor, and courage, Brown writes mostly about love in a story about the waste of war.

Dirty Work

All hell breaks loose in Northern Mississippi when the daughter of degenerate sharecroppers runs away from home and lights out across the state with two dollars and a pack of cigarettes to her name.

A Novel

A classic story of good and evil set in the rural American South of 1968.

Winner of the Southern Book Award

Father and Son

Larry Brown's highly praised novel Dirty Work established him as one of the fiercest and most powerful new voices in Southern literature, a writer who understands the sorrows and joys of everyday life. That same compassionate regard for ordinary people shines on every page of Big Bad Love, whose heroes in these stories have a fatal weakness for beer, fast women, and pick-up trucks, and who find a kind of salvation in the reckless pursuit of love.

Stories

Big Bad Love

"Larry Brown wrote the way the best singers sing: with honesty, grit, and the kind of raw emotion that stabs you right in the heart. He was a singular American treasure." —Tim McGraw A career-spanning collection, Tiny Love brings together for the first time the stories of Larry Brown’s previous collections along with those never before gathered. The self-taught Brown has long had a cult following, and this collection comes with an intimate and heartfelt appreciation by novelist Jonathan Miles. We see Brown's early forays into genre fiction and the horror story, then develop his fictional gaze closer to home, on the people and landscapes of Lafayette County, Mississippi. And what’s astonishing here is the odyssey these stories chart: Brown’s self-education as a writer and the incredible artistic journey he navigated from “Plant Growin’ Problems” to “A Roadside Resurrection.” This is the whole of Larry Brown, the arc laid bare, both an amazing story collection and the fullest portrait we’ll see of one of the South’s most singular artists.

The Complete Stories

Tiny Love

Larry Brown's idiosyncratic and powerful Southern novels have earned him widespread critical acclaim. Now, in an ambitious narrative structure reminiscent of Robert Altman's classic film Nashville, this "true original" (Chicago Tribune) weaves together the stories of a sprawling cast of eccentric and lovable characters, each embarked on a quest for meaning, fulfillment, and love -- with poignant and uproarious results. Set in Memphis and north Mississippi, The Rabbit Factory follows the colliding lives of, among others, Arthur, an older, socially ill-at-ease man of considerable wealth married to the much younger Helen, whose desperate need for satisfaction sweeps her into the arms of other men; Eric, who has run away from home thinking his father doesn't want him and becomes Arthur's unlikely surrogate son; Domino, an ex-con now involved in the drug trade, who runs afoul of a twisted cop; and Anjalee, a big-hearted prostitute with her own set of troubles, who crashes into the lives of the others like a one-woman hurricane. Teeming with pitch-perfect creations that include quirky gangsters, colorful locals, seemingly straitlaced professors, and fast-and-loose police officers, Brown tells a spellbinding and often hilarious story about the botched choices and missed chances that separate people -- and the tenuous threads of love and coincidence that connect them. With all the subtlety and surprise of life itself, the story turns on a dime from comical to violent to moving. Masterful, profound, and full of spirit, The Rabbit Factory is literary entertainment of the highest order.

The Rabbit Factory

The final novel by the late author of Dirty Work and Facing the Music describes a single year in the lives of four men--including Cortez Sharp, a farmer with a terrible secret; gambler Tommy Bright; Cleve, a black neighbor whose daughter is involved with an unworthy man; and Jimmy, a child born to a man beyond redemption.

A Novel in Progress

A Miracle of Catfish

Facing the Music

Novantadue giorni

A collection of ten powerful short stories about men and the obsessions that rule them, such as sex, alcohol, fear, and ambition

Recounting his experiences of danger and adventure, a former firefighter describes how he and his companions adjust to the frequent horrors they witness and struggle for balance in an effort to live normal lives. By the author of Joe. Reprint.

On Fire

Marty Hall

Offers real-world examples demonstrating a variety of Web development programming languages and tools, covering HTML 3.2, Netscape and Internet Explorer extensions, CGI programming, and Java.

Core Web Programming

Brown delivers a series of nine essays that assail the Mississippi farm life of his early years. Woven in are intimate reflections on the South and its musicians, writers, farmers, fishers and dreamers that Brown has grown to know so well.

Billy Ray's Farm

Shannon Ravenel

Stories by writers with Southern backgrounds deal with the modern problems of life in the South

New Stories from the South : the Year's Best. 1986-2007

Neuf nouvelles poignantes sur l’Amérique des paumés et des laissés-pour-compte.

Affronter l'orage

Facing the Music, Larry Brown’s first book, was originally published in 1988 to wide critical acclaim. As the St. Petersburg Times review pointed out, the central theme of these ten stories “is the ageless collision of man with woman, woman with man--with the frequent introduction of that other familiar couple, drinking and violence. Most often ugly, love is nevertheless graceful, however desperate the situation.” There’s some glare from the brutally bright light Larry Brown shines on his subjects. This is the work of a writer unafraid to gaze directly at characters challenged by crisis and pathology. But for readers who are willing to look, unblinkingly, along with the writer, there are unusual rewards.

Larry Brown

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