A Rosellen Brown Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (Bread Loaf Series of Contemporary Writers) - Hardcover

Brown, Rosellen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0874515750 ISBN 13: 9780874515756

Publisher: Middlebury College, 1992

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Following her own "first rule" for writers--to "steal from yourself relentlessly"--in this collection of poems, stories essays and one interview, Brown ( Tender Mercies ) practices the "free movement across the borders of genres." A recurrent theme is the displacements and rootlessness of the author's early life, which led her as a writer to adopt the perspectives of diverse people, communities and heritages. Her characters do not inhabit the null space of much contemporary fiction, nor are they larger than life; they exist against the backdrop of history, however local. In "Re: Femme " a dying senator ghoulishly tries to gerrymander his wife's selection of a new lover; a woman's passion for the head of a refugee family forces her to confront herself in "The International Language." As an unrepentant realist and enemy of abstraction, Brown worries that her prose will be "unleavened," but reveals her origins as a poet in arresting images and tones. The cross-fertilization works less well with the poetry, which is sometimes too controlled, too pointed. The essays, which seem to be the heart of the book, both illuminate their subjects and yield new insights into Brown's literary genesis.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Middlebury College
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0874515750
• ISBN 13: 9780874515756
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 309