Dirty Work - Softcover

Brown, Larry

4.17

1,998 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679730494 ISBN 13: 9780679730491

Publisher: Vintage, 1990

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Braiden Chaney has no arms or legs. Walter James has no face. They lost them in Vietnam, along with other, more vital parts of themselves. Now, twenty-two years later, these two Mississippians -- one black, the other white -- lie in adjoining beds in a V.A. hospital. In the course of one long night they tell each other how they came to be what they are and what they can only dream of becoming. Their stories, recounted in voices as distinct and indelible as those of Faulkner, add up to the story of the war itself, and make Dirty Work the most devastating novel of its kind since Dalton Trumbo's Johnny got his gun.

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From the Back Cover:

"A novel of the first order...gripping and virtually seamless....The writing, the characters, and the plot are so compelling that you can't help but stay with the book until its conclusion."

-- Washington Post Book World"One sure way to deromanticize tomcat is to show its long-term effects. That's what Larry Brown does in this fine...first novel."

-- Newsweek

"Brown probes the hard luck of the down and out, the grim realities at the bottom of the scrap....His prose has a dark, horrific urgency. ...a real knockout."

-- Newsday

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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