American Romances: Essays

(Paperback)

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"Everything and nothing is sacred in Rebecca Brown's essays. Tongue, word, thought, and intellect all conspire in a free language love of living history, divination, sex, solitude and amusement. She is America's only real rock n' roll schoolteacher. Lessons layered with profundity and protracted parallels. Where old world religion, Gertrude Stein and Oreo cookies co-exist in an actual and mystic world of wonder." --Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth

"If Rebecca Brown's talent for prose were any tighter, it would be a lyric -- to a pop standard. An homage -- a menage -- to America, exposing what's laid bare in a comic tragic redux. I laughed till it hurt." --Van Dyke Parks, Composer/Arranger

"Anyone who can get from the Eucharist, to a Necco Wafer, to the goo beween the Oreo wafers, to the Inquisition, to the goo between the legs of excited young women is a distant sibling of mine. She can dash and she can drift and she is not much interested in the really bad parts that might qualify as confession. She likes the float of quotidian living and I like to read the words upon which she floats." -- Dave Hickey, author of Air Guitar

The impulse to tell our worst to a bunch of strangers has been fueling American self-hood for 300 years: there's a direct line from the Puritan confession narrative to today's lurid, inescapable exhibitionism. But whose stories are we telling

This collection of mordant, poignant, and playful essays shows Rebecca Brown at the height of her imaginative and intuitive powers. A wry, incisive social and literary critique is couched in a gonzo mix of pop culture, autobiography, fiction, literary history, misremembered movie plots, and fantasy that plays with the notion of what it is to be American. Fantastical connections and unlikely meetings span the course of Americas cultural history in a manic remix, featuring appearances by Brian Wilson, Gertrude Stein, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Invisible Man, the Abligensian Crusade, John Wayne, Felix Mendelssohn, JFK, Shane, and God.

Rebecca Browns books include: The Gifts of the Body, The Last Time I Saw You, The Haunted House, Terrible Girls, and The End of Youth.

Reviews

"Rebecca Brown's newest collection of short fiction pulses with desires that cannot be attained--knowledge, understanding, quiescence, and love. . . . The straightforward prose style belies Brown's penchant for brilliant narrative, which at any moment can turn from the gentle and intimate to the violent and bizarre." - Utne Reader "She is one of the few truly original modern lesbian writers, one who constantly pushes both her own boundaries and those of her readers." - San Francisco Chronicle

Author Bio

Rebecca Brown is the author of a dozen books of prose including THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU, THE END OF YOUTH, THE DOGS, THE TERRIBLE GIRLS (City Lights) and THE GIFTS OF THE BODY (HarperCollins). She recently co-edited, with Mary Jane Knecht, an anthology of writers' responses to work at the Frye Art Museum.