Facing the Music: Stories (Bright Leaf Short Fiction, 6) - Hardcover

Brown, Larry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0912697911 ISBN 13: 9780912697918

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1988

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

From Publishers Weekly:

A fireman-turned-writer from Oxford, Miss., Faulkner's hometown, Brown uses vernacular speech to good effect in these 10 raw, festering tales of the Deep South. His protagonists, nearly all men, seek escape in booze, sex, TV, religion and fantasy; a few are redeemed by good intentions, most muddle through. In the comic and sad title story, a husband is reluctant to make love to his wife because of her mastectomy. Several pieces experiment with form. "Julie: A Memory," a stream-of-consciousness rant, splices fragmentary recollections of teenage sex, abortion, murder; in "Leaving Town," a tawdry romantic affair is relayed in alternating voices by a married bricklayer and the "other" woman in the triangle. "Night Life" is an auto mechanic's lament about the crazy women he picks up in bars. There is an unvarying sameness to many of these unfulfilled lives, but Brown pierces the macho armor to discover the hurt, love and caring.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0912697911
• ISBN 13: 9780912697918
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 167