Joe: A Novel - Hardcover

Brown, Larry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0945575610 ISBN 13: 9780945575610

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1991

Synopsis

The lives of two men--Joe Ransom, a drinking, gambling, reckless fifty-year-old, and Gary Jones, a luckless fifteen-year-old raised by an evil father and an insane mother, become intertwined in a novel of good, evil, temptation, and sacrifice

About this title

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0945575610
• ISBN 13: 9780945575610
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 345