Tiny Love: The Complete Stories

(Paperback)

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"Larry Brown wrote the way the best singers sing: with honesty, grit, and the kind of raw emotion that stabs you right in the heart. He was a singular American treasure."Tim McGraw

A career-spanning collection,Tiny Lovebrings together for the first time the stories of Larry Browns previous collections along withthose never before gathered. The self-taught Brown has long had a cult following,and this collection comes with an intimate and heartfelt appreciation by novelist Jonathan Miles. We see Brown's early forays intogenre fiction and the horror story, then develop his fictional gaze closer to home, on the people and landscapes of Lafayette County,Mississippi. And whats astonishing here is the odyssey these stories chart: Browns self-education as a writer and the incredibleartistic journey he navigated from Plant Growin Problems to A Roadside Resurrection. This is the whole of Larry Brown, the arclaid bare, both an amazing story collection and the fullest portrait well see of one of the Souths most singular artists.

Reviews

Blunt, brilliant tales of hardscrabble lives.
The New York Times Book Review

Drawn in gritty, deceptively simple prose, his characters drink too much, smoke too much, and flout the law when they can. But Brown proves that the coarsest material can produce the most affecting art.
Mens Journal

The complete collection of Browns darkly comic short stories starring smart and salty workaday Southerners . . . Now counted among the titans of modern Southern storytellers, Brown lived a life that proclaimed the power of writing your own dream.
Garden Gun

This collection showcases the depth of Browns work and his evolution as a Mississippi artist and writer.
Deep South Magazine

There is a stark, stripped-down quality to Browns writing. His language is blunt and sometimes coarse. It is the pitch-perfect voice for telling the indelible stories of these working-class men and women who strive to do right but who often prove to be their own worst enemies.
Atlanta Journal Constitution

A thorough testament to his loving eye for rural minutiae. The details in each story . . . could only be the work of someone whod shared an Old Milwaukee or two with his characters . . . Tiny Loveshowcases Browns singular, unconditional empathy for the drunk and neglectful, the depraved but helpless, the ornery yet resignedall the dogs that dont make it across the highway.
INDY Week

Threads of humor and grace run through the tales of violence, infidelities, and alcoholism, masterfully introducing an unexpected compassion. Brown excels at capturing psychological complexity with spare, humane prose in an original voice that was sadly lost to us far too soon.
Booklist

[An] outstanding, capacious volume . . . Whether exploring the underbelly of love or the despair of editorial rejection, Browns stories drip with often uncomfortable detail as he describes the crass, the ugly, and the broken in ways unique and captivating.
Publishers Weekly

Larry Brown was a celebrated writer of the grit lit genre who wrote spare, brutal stories about hard-drinking, love-hungry barflies, Vietnam vets, hunters, bricklayers and loggers.
Atlanta Journal Constitution

A career-spanning collection by a master of American realism . . . Compassionate and gritty and lyricala master class.
Kirkus Reviews

When I discoveredBig Bad Love, I went back and read everything. That man could write. He moved through life with a discerning eye and a capacity for language that I wanted. How did he do that Story makes sense of what cannot make sense just by showing you the broken tragic heart that goes on beating. Which he did so beautifully. And with a sense of humor, Lord save us . . . I could read Larry Brown anytime, even though I know whats coming, even though I know hes going to break my heart again.
Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

Larry Brown wrote stories that captured both the beauty and the brokenness of life. He never blinked at lifes darkness, but drew you into it with his characters. Larry Brown wrote the way the best singers sing: with honesty, grit, and the kind of raw emotion that stabs you right in the heart. He was a singular American treasure.
Tim McGraw
Blunt, brilliant tales of hardscrabble lives.
The New York Times Book Review

Drawn in gritty, deceptively simple prose, his characters drink too much, smoke too much, and flout the law when they can. But Brown proves that the coarsest material can produce the most affecting art.
Mens Journal

The complete collection of Browns darkly comic short stories starring smart and salty workaday Southerners . . . Now counted among the titans of modern Southern storytellers, Brown lived a life that proclaimed the power of writing your own dream.
Garden Gun

This collection showcases the depth of Browns work and his evolution as a Mississippi artist and writer.
Deep South Magazine

There is a stark, stripped-down quality to Browns writing. His language is blunt and sometimes coarse. It is the pitch-perfect voice for telling the indelible stories of these working-class men and women who strive to do right but who often prove to be their own worst enemies.
Atlanta Journal Constitution

A thorough testament to his loving eye for rural minutiae. The details in each story . . . could only be the work of someone whod shared an Old Milwaukee or two with his characters . . . Tiny Loveshowcases Browns singular, unconditional empathy for the drunk and neglectful, the depraved but helpless, the ornery yet resignedall the dogs that dont make it across the highway.
INDY Week

Threads of humor and grace run through the tales of violence, infidelities, and alcoholism, masterfully introducing an unexpected compassion. Brown excels at capturing psychological complexity with spare, humane prose in an original voice that was sadly lost to us far too soon.
Booklist

[An] outstanding, capacious volume . . . Whether exploring the underbelly of love or the despair of editorial rejection, Browns stories drip with often uncomfortable detail as he describes the crass, the ugly, and the broken in ways unique and captivating.
Publishers Weekly

Larry Brown was a celebrated writer of the grit lit genre who wrote spare, brutal stories about hard-drinking, love-hungry barflies, Vietnam vets, hunters, bricklayers and loggers.
Atlanta Journal Constitution

A career-spanning collection by a master of American realism . . . Compassionate and gritty and lyricala master class.
Kirkus Reviews

When I discoveredBig Bad Love, I went back and read everything. That man could write. He moved through life with a discerning eye and a capacity for language that I wanted. How did he do that Story makes sense of what cannot make sense just by showing you the broken tragic heart that goes on beating. Which he did so beautifully. And with a sense of humor, Lord save us . . . I could read Larry Brown anytime, even though I know whats coming, even though I know hes going to break my heart again.
Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

Larry Brown wrote stories that captured both the beauty and the brokenness of life. He never blinked at lifes darkness, but drew you into it with his characters. Larry Brown wrote the way the best singers sing: with honesty, grit, and the kind of raw emotion that stabs you right in the heart. He was a singular American treasure.
Tim McGraw

Author Bio

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 full time. (The nonfiction bookOn Fire tells the story of his many years as a firefighter.) Between then and his untimely death in 2004, he published seven more books.He was awarded the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction andwas the first two-time winner of the Southern Book Award for Fiction, which he won in 1992 forJoe,and again in 1997 for Father and Son. He was the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award and Mississippi's Governor's Award For Excellence in the Arts. The story "Big Bad Love" became the basis for a feature film, as did his novel Joe.

• Jonathan Miles is the author of the novelsDear American Airlines,Want Not, andAnatomy of a Miracle.He is a former columnist for theNew York Timesand has served as a contributing editor to a wide range of national magazines. His journalism has been included numerous times in the annual Best American Sports Writing and Best American Crime writing anthologies.A former longtime resident of Oxford, Mississippi, he currently lives along the Delaware River in rural New Jersey.