Larry never regarded the people he wrote about the way reviewers did: as (and I’m quoting here) poor whites, the underclass, lumpen, rednecks, trailer trash, white trash. (When one magazine crowned him the “King of White Trash,” Larry slyly told Leanne, his daughter, that this made her the Princess of White Trash.) These were economic and classist designations, and economics and class—and for that matter categories—never interested Larry. The models for his characters were individuals, not types: the people he’d grown up with, that he’d worked beside, that he’d get talking to at bars, that he’d rescued from crushed vehicles, that he’d listened to trading stories and gossip at the little country store he ran for a while in the eighties, that he’d see walking shoeless on the roadside with no easy destination he could imagine for them. What interested him was what their hearts contained: love, grief, meanness, longing, fear, hurt. Not the frailties that came from being poor, but rather those that came from being human.

A few more notes, before you turn to the good stuff. There are four stories wedged between those that were collected, respectively, in Facing the Music and Big Bad Love: “And Another Thing,” “The Crying,” “Tiny Love,” and “A Birthday Party.” Larry published the first two in Reb Fiction ’90, a locally published anthology that Barry Hannah edited in 1990. “Twenty-Three Short Stories from Barry Hannah’s Writing Class” was the subtitle, but as Barry intimated in his preface, the correct number should have been twenty-one. “I’ve taught everyone in these pages except Larry Brown, who never needed the school,” he wrote, “and whose name stands for the real condition of the Rebel, as rebellious against the system, the preposterous deal that life puts on us.”

Larry worked sporadically on “Tiny Love” over the course of several years, before publishing it, in 1994, in an anthology entitled Writer’s Harvest. It’s a tragicomic romp about the limits of love, the carrying capacity of devotion, that ends with a startlingly dark swerve, the photonegative of an O. Henry twist. With a fingerpicked guitar accompaniment, it could be one of the John Prine ballads Larry so loved: desolate, droll, stoical, cockeyed, prickly, lovelorn.