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For more than a decade Rebecca Brown has been one of the best-kept secrets in fiction writing. Her first four novels garnered praise among other writers, and last year her
Gifts of the Body proved to a wide-readership that she was one of the finest stylists working today. Her prose is plain-spoken and effective, but carries a wallop; her newest book,
What Keeps Me Here, a collection of stories, amazes us with its purity and emotional resonance. Whether she is writing about the relationship of a woman to her art, or the violence that haunts relationships, Brown moves and speaks through her characters like light through a window, or grace through a soul.
From Publishers Weekly
If Samuel Beckett were a woman in late- 20th century America, he might have written stories like Brown's. None of Brown's characters?except the most peripheral?have names, and the author's use of pronouns and simple, declarative sentences gives her writing a flat affect that rises to a nearly hysterical pitch with the accumulation of details. The best stories in the collection begin with a seemingly innocuous event. The narrator of "Bread" invests the morning ritual of eating rolls in a girls' school with special importance because of her obsession with the schoolmate who eats the lone wheat roll at breakfast. "A Relationship" is the story of a married woman who phones her former female lover in the middle of the night, told from the first-person point of view of each participant in the lovers' triangle. Some of the most disturbing stories in this collection are ironic takes on fairy tales. In "The Princess and the Pea," the first sentence?"There's something in the bed, she says"?signals that the lovers' relationship has gone seriously awry, and the problems only intensify as the two take apart the bed, searching for the alien presence. Although a few of the stories are self-consciously elliptical or annoyingly arch, Brown (The Gifts of the Body) is a provocative writer whose intense imagination invests these tales with eerie menace.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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