Joe $175.00
Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin (1991)
Very good in black and white decorated wrappers.
Father and Son $150.00
Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin (1996)
Very good in publisher wrappers.
Conversations with Larry Brown $22.00
Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press (2007)
New in decorated wrappers.
Edited by Jay Watson
Faulkner’s World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain $350.00
Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press (1997)
Signed by Larry Brown (Foreword) and Tom Rankin (Editor)
Fine in dust jacket.
Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe II $350.00
San Francisco, CA: Macadam/Cage (2003)
An Anthology of Southern Writers.
Fine in dust jacket. Signed by Larry Brown and many other southern writers including Ron Rash, Sonny Brewer, and William Gay.
Facing the Music $350.00
Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin (1988)
Near fine in dust jacket.
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: A Writer’s Life $50.00
Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press (2011)
Near fine in dust jacket. Signed by the author, Jean W. Cash.
Larry Brown (1951-2004) was unique among writers who started their careers in the late twentieth century. Unlike most of them–his friends Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Rick Bass, Kaye Gibbons, among others–he was neither a product of a writing program, nor did he teach at one. In fact, he did not even attend college. His innate talent, his immersion in the life of north Mississippi, and his determination led him to national success. Drawing on excerpts from numerous letters and material from interviews with family members and friends,Larry Brown: A Writer’s Life is the first biography of a landmark southern writer.
Jean W. Cash explores the cultural milieu of Oxford, Mississippi, and the writers who influenced Brown, including William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews, and Cormac McCarthy. She covers Brown’s history in Mississippi, the troubled family in which he grew up, and his boyhood in Tula and Yocona, Mississippi, and in Memphis, Tennessee. She relates stories from Brown’s time in the Marines, his early married life–which included sixteen years as an Oxford fireman–and what he called his “apprenticeship” period, the eight years during which he was teaching himself to write publishable fiction.
The book examines Brown’s years as a writer: the stories and novels he wrote, his struggles to acclimate himself to the fame his writing brought him, and his many trips outside Yocona, where he spent the last thirty years of his life. The book concludes with a discussion of his posthumous fame, including the publication of A Miracle of Catfish, the novel he had nearly completed just before his death. Brown’s cadre of fans will relish this comprehensive portrait of the man and his work.
Jean W. Cash, Broadway, Virginia, is professor emerita of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Flannery O’Connor: A Life and coeditor of Larry Brown and the Blue-Collar South (University Press of Mississippi).
~ 400 pages (approx.), 30 b&w illustrations, bibliography, index
Billy Ray’s Farm $125.00
Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin (2001)
Very good in dust jacket. Front end paper is creased.
Father and Son $150.00
Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books (1996)
Near fine in dust jacket.
Convicted and sentenced on a vehicular homicide charge, Glen is the bad seed – the haunted, angry, drunken, and dangerous son of Virgil and Emma Davis. Bobby Blanchard is the sheriff, as different from Glen as can be imagined, but in love with the same woman – the mother of Glen’s illegitimate son.
Before he’s been back in town thirty-six hours, Glen has robbed his war-crippled father, bullied and humiliated his younger brother, and rejected his son, David. Bobby finds himself sorting through the mayhem Glen leaves in his wake – a murdered bar owner, a rape, Glen’s terrorized family, and the little boy who needs a father. And, as he gets closer and closer to the murderous Glen, tension builds like a Mississippi thunderstorm about to break loose.
Fay $150.00
Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin (2000)
Near fine in dust jacket.
A beautiful, naive, and good-hearted woman, Fay is fleeing home and her father’s sexual advances, only to encounter a series of men all too willing to take care of her. As she makes her way from the woods just north of Oxford to the beaches of Biloxi, leaving bodies in her wake, Fay emerges as one of the most captivating heroines in recent fiction — an innocent beauty with a sure-fire instinct for survival.
On Fire $75.00
Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin (1994)
Near fine in dust jacket.
On January 6, 1990, after seventeen years on the job, award-winning novelist Larry Brown quit the Oxford, Mississippi, Fire Department. With three published books to his credit and a fourth nearly finished, he made the risky decision to try life as a full-time writer. On Fire, his first work of nonfiction, looks back on his life as a full-time firefighter. Unflinching accounts of daily trauma – from the blistering heat of burning trailer homes to the crunch of broken glass at crash scenes – catapult readers into the hard reality that has driven Larry Brown. As firefighter and fireman-turned-author, as husband and hunter, and as father and son, Brown offers insights into the choices men face pursuing their life’s work. And, in the forthright style we expect from Larry Brown, his diary builds incrementally and forcefully to the explanation of how one man who regularly confronted death began to burn with the desire to write about life.