Joe - Softcover

Brown, Larry

4.17

3,377 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446394386 ISBN 13: 9780446394383

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 1992

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Hailed as an important voice in contemporary American literary fiction, Larry Brown is the critically acclaimed author of the antiwar novel Dirty Work and the short story collection Big Bad Love. In Joe, an unfulfilled 50-year-old and a desperate 15-year-old team up and follow a twisting map to redemption--or ruin--in this "raw and gritty" (Kirkus Reviews) Southern novel.

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From the Back Cover:

“Brilliant . . . Larry Brown has slapped his own fresh tattoo on the big right arm of Southern Lit.” ―The Washington Post Book World

Joe Ransom is a hard-drinking ex-con pushing fifty who just won’t slow down--not in his pickup, not with a gun, and certainly not with women. Gary Jones estimates his own age to be about fifteen. Born luckless, he is the son of a hopeless, homeless wandering family, and he’s desperate for a way out. When their paths cross, Joe offers him a chance just as his own chances have dwindled to almost nothing. Together they follow a twisting map to redemption--or ruin.

“Literature of the first order . . . Powerful stuff spun by a sure, patient hand . . . His characters just are. They call to mind the Joads in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the pictures and people in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It is an understated, powerful, beautiful evocation of a place, a time, a people. It is a book that will last.” ―Detroit Free Press

“Luminescent prose tempered by wit.” ―The New York Times Book Review

“Sinewy and lyrical.” ―Los Angeles Times

“Brown compels our admiration, Joe himself makes us care.” ―Newsweek

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.

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