Rosellen Brown

The New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book Carolyn and Ben Reiser moved to Hyland, New Hampshire with their two children for the comforts of rural life. But when the local police chief comes looking for their seventeen-year-old son Jacob to question him about the brutal murder of his girlfriend, the Reisers' lives begin to unravel. A compelling story that will capture you in the opening scene and hold you through its shocking conclusion, Before and After is a stunning novel that pits parent against parent, brother against sister, family against community, blood loyalty against law-as "deep questions of loyalty, honesty, and love are forced to the surface in this psychologically riveting tale." (Library Journal)

A Novel

Before and After

Rosellen Brown, author of ten celebrated books, is back with a gritty and absorbing novel situated in 19th century Chicago.

The Lake on Fire

Lex Williford

Michael Martone

Collects short stories from authors across the literary landscape

Fifty North American Stories Since 1970

The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction

An unforgettable novel about race and motherhood from the bestselling author of Before and After Once a Civil Rights activist, Miriam Vener feels trapped in the comfortable upper-middle-class life she leads with her family in Houston in the 1980s. That life suddenly shatters with the appearance, after almost eighteen years, of Veronica (Ronnee), Miriam's biracial daughter born of her passionate affair a generation ago with Eljay, a brilliant black professor at a Mississippi college, who has raised the child. When Miriam introduces her daughter to the utterly white New England town where she summers, and to the Houston society that represents her own compromise of her '60s ideals, the results are complicated. What claim does Miriam have on Ronnee after all this time, and what does Ronnee, no longer a child, want of her mother now? As Miriam desperately and awkwardly invites affection from this stranger who shares her blood, Ronnee--hot-tempered, sensitive, manipulative, and deeply hurt--wrestles with her fury at her mother's mysterious disappearance from her life and searches for reparations. With which family--and which race--does Ronnee identify, and how does that affect her relationships with her newly discovered half sister, her white boyfriend, and the father she is rebelling against? A moving story about estrangement and intimacy, race and privilege, identity and belonging, Half a Heart is a searingly honest novel of public and private ideals betrayed and hopes reignited, in which one of our foremost novelists probes the way history and unyielding love shape our lives.

Half a Heart

The author of Tender Mercies and Civil Wars demonstrates her command of diverse genres in this engaging collection of poetry, short stories, and essays. Best known for her carefully crafted, emotionally resonant novels, Rosellen Brown is committed to the ideal of the well-rounded writer. She shifts easily from prose to poetry, from fiction to nonfiction, from novels to short stories with an assured mastery of each form that enriches her work in the others. This Reader is the first book to bring together her work in a variety of genres, presenting many previously uncollected stories and essays. The collection reveals the wide range of her imagination and the evolution of her central themes. "Like a pilot flying low over the land," she writes in her introduction, "I've finally been able to study what my 'central work,' my novels, can't teach me--the general shape of my preoccupations across the years; the rises and declivities of skill, curiosity, casual engagement, and inescapable obsession." Intermixing clusters of short stories, poetry, and essays, Brown creates a collage of her own writing in which certain themes--the struggle for self-definition in terms of gender, ethnic heritage, or sense of place; the responsibilities of human beings to one another; the constant challenge of adapting to changing circumstances--recur in the midst of experimentation in form, voice, and structure. In a final interview, she says, "ultimately, all of our work will be seen from a distance, like a view of the earth from above, and it will turn out that the shape and size of this or that body of writing will look wholly different from up there." This Reader is our first step in gaining that elevated perspective on a distinguished career.

Selected Poetry and Prose

A Rosellen Brown Reader

Through the persona of Cora Fry, a wife and mother living in a small New Hampshire town, Rosellen Brown explores the ambivalent ties of love, loyalty, marriage, and family in a series of related poems. This volume includes the entire text of Cora Fry (1977), a kind of dramatic monologue, written in spare, simple lines, which describes the young woman's daily life and troubled marriage. A sequel of newer poems, Cora Fry's Pillow Book (1994), confronts the challenges that come with a woman's growth toward middle age, reflecting an older Cora's place in her family, community, and the larger world.

Cora Fry's Pillow Book

In an act of boyish bravado, Dan Courser attempt to steer a boat he cannot handle and causes an accident that ruptures the lives of his family, leading to a series of shattering revelations, in a critically acclaimed novel. Reprint.

Rosellen Brown

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