Big Bad Love [Paperback]

Womanizing, heavy-drinking, often desperate backwoods loners inhabit this virtuoso collection of short stories. According to PW , "A casual glance suggests invasion of Raymond Carver territory, but Brown stakes out his own turf by dint of his integrity and wit; his heroes are savants of the down-and-out set, harrowingly aware of their own limitations without abandoning hope of salvation."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the author of Dirty Work , a searing war/antiwar novel ( LJ 7/89), comes a rich, moody collection of stories. All feature male protagonists of the beer-drinking, pick-up truck-driving persuasion, who are awkwardly trying to relate to women in a raunchy, sentimental way. Most seem stranded by a failure to communicate, a yearning to connect with others. "Discipline" is a different style, effectively told as a courtroom interrogation. The final long story, "92 Days," is an almost too-real chronicle of a writer trying to get published, struggling with a lack of money and a bitter ex-wife, drinking too much, but still driven by the need to write. Brown, an ex-firefighter from Oxford, Mississippi, might just become another powerhouse Southern writer.
- Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"An entirely worthy successor [to Dirty Work], enlivened by a racy metaphor [and] invested with stunning presence and complexity."--The New York Times Book Review

"Big, bad and wonderful...A stunning collection of stories about real people and real life."-- Atlanta Journal And Constitution

"Rather like some perfect object one has come across in a wilderness, these are stories of affirmation...human, compassionate and compelling."-- Harry Crews, Los Angeles Times

"A voice as true as a gun rack, unpretentious and uncorrupted. [In] a surprising combination of sharp wit and great sorrow...comes a sure sense of a compassionate writer deeply in touch with the sorrowful rhythms of not just Southern, but human, life."-- Philadelphia Inquirer

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.

"An entirely worthy successor [to Dirty Work], enlivened by a racy metaphor [and] invested with stunning presence and complexity."--The New York Times Book Review

"Big, bad and wonderful...A stunning collection of stories about real people and real life."-- Atlanta Journal And Constitution

"Rather like some perfect object one has come across in a wilderness, these are stories of affirmation...human, compassionate and compelling."-- Harry Crews, Los Angeles Times

"A voice as true as a gun rack, unpretentious and uncorrupted. [In] a surprising combination of sharp wit and great sorrow...comes a sure sense of a compassionate writer deeply in touch with the sorrowful rhythms of not just Southern, but human, life."-- Philadelphia Inquirer