Cover

Title

Tiny Love

The Complete Stories of Larry Brown

With a Foreword by Jonathan Miles

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2019

Foreword

Larry hated me telling this story. But Larry also understood that the most natural place to begin is at the beginning, and this was ours.

Late in 1992 I was sitting at the upstairs bar at the City Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi, when a man approached me. He was older than me by a couple decades: neither tall nor short, sparely built, with doleful-looking eyes and a narrow face etched in worry lines. Shyly, in a smoky, murmury drawl, he asked if I was the one who’d written the short story in that week’s issue of SouthVine, a local alt-weekly. I told him I was. “My name’s Larry Brown,” he said, and while this should’ve knocked me back, it didn’t. Larry had published four books by then, the covers of which I’d seen down the block at Square Books, but I’d yet to read any of them. The writers I was reading then were all long dead; literature, I guess I thought, was the handiwork of ghosts. I was too young and too dumb, in other words, to feel any weight in the moment; I certainly didn’t sense the gears of my life shifting.

He said a few generous words about the story, and, softened, I admitted it was the first piece of fiction I’d ever published. This triggered something in him—a flash of a grin, a gleam in his expression—that I’d only understand later. “My wife and I are headed downstairs to eat some quail,” he said, pointing behind him to a woman who stood waiting with a look of tender exasperation. “Why don’t you come on down with us and we’ll celebrate?”

I need to be honest here: My stomach hollered yes before the rest of me did. On that night, like many before and after, I had about eight dollars to my name—enough for a few beers and, if any bills remained, a half-pint of chicken salad from James Food Center. (Mary Annie, Larry’s wife, would later say that’s why she put up with him inviting some random kid to dinner with them—I was clearly starving.) The City Grocery, now a Mississippi dining landmark, was brand-new that year. While the upstairs bar was humble and rowdy, with drinks served in plastic cups and a rack of Zapp’s potato chips behind the bar, the downstairs restaurant was urbane and elegant—what back then we called fancy. Candlelight shimmered across white cotton tablecloths. Servers carried expensive bottles of wine as gently as they would infant children. The green beans called themselves haricots verts.