Larry Brown was the first fiction writer I knew, so for many years I thought the reactions his work inspired—the pilgrimages to his front door, the flood of letters and manuscripts from prisons and college campuses and all points between, the late-night phone calls from strangers that forced the Browns to change their phone number more than once—were normal, the standard repercussions of art. They weren’t. Nor were they limited to what we might call civilians. Writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Harry Crews wrote of his first encounter with Facing the Music: “In twenty-five years of writing, it was the first time I picked up the phone and tried to call the author.” Why? Our responses to art are always particular and peculiar, so it’s dicey to generalize; but I did see a common thread over the years. Larry never came across, as many writers do, as a kind of lifeguard to his characters, monitoring them from a high, dry perch. No, Larry was always down in the water with them, no matter how deep and churning, so that when the rip tides came, the panics and struggle felt immediate and real. The word authentic often got bandied about, in praise of Larry, but that word has always seemed freighted to me, a marketer’s term. What authentic got at, but didn’t fully elucidate, was the fidelity in Larry’s work, both textural and psychological; the way he rendered life without distortion, without gloss, without sentiment; the way his stories reflected the human condition not as he wanted it to be—or the bleak flip side, how he feared it to be—but rather how it was, and how it felt. Even in “A Roadside Resurrection”—this collection’s final story, and Larry’s most parodic (and berserk) offering—he’s channeling something real: the grotesque dimensions of faith, the burning desire for transcendence. Dig a shovel into his stories, in short, and you’ll pull up clay; cut his characters and they’ll bleed. “It may be going too far,” wrote Eudora Welty, “to say that the exactness and concreteness and solidity of the real world achieved in a story correspond to the intensity of feeling in the author’s mind and to the very turn of his heart; but there lies the secret of our confidence in him.” Our confidence, and perhaps our urge to call him in the dark of the night: to commiserate with a fellow traveler who hasn’t just witnessed life’s burdens but, based on the stooped shoulders of his prose, must’ve surely also strained and faltered beneath them.