“A marvelous book … Brown’s swift, intuitive dialogue explodes like a land mine and leaves the reader dizzy with shock.” —The Kansas City Star

“A real knockout.” —New York Newsday

“Stunning power … Dirty Work makes the human cost of war achingly real.” —USA Today

Praise for Big Bad Love

“Invested with stunning presence and complexity.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Big, bad and wonderful … A stunning collection of stories about real people and real life.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Rather like some perfect object one has come across in a wilderness, these are stories of affirmation … Human, compassionate and compelling.” —Harry Crews, Los Angeles Times

“A voice as true as a gun rack, unpretentious and uncorrupted. [In] a surprising combination of sharp wit and great sorrow … comes a sure sense of a compassionate writer deeply in touch with the sorrowful rhythms of not just Southern, but human, life.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

Praise for Joe

“Brilliant … Larry Brown has slapped his own fresh tattoo on the big right arm of Southern Lit.” —The Washington Post Book World

“The novel, written in a luminescent prose tempered by wit, moves gracefully forward by tracking the independent movements of its three artfully conceived and skillfully balanced principals. As their lives mesh, the novel’s momentum, and its rewards, build. A fourth major role may be said to belong to the terrain itself, a Mississippi so vividly sketched you can all but mount it on your wall.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Sinewy and lyrical.” —Los Angeles Times

“Brown compels our admiration, Joe himself makes us care.” —Newsweek

“Literature of the first order … Powerful stuff spun by a sure, patient hand … His characters just are. They call to mind the Joads in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the pictures and people in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It is an understated, powerful, beautiful evocation of a place, a time, a people. It is a book that will last.” —Detroit Free Press

“Sheer storytelling power.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Simple and powerful … Great rowdy fun to read.” —Time

“Gifted with a brilliant descriptive ability, a perfect ear for dialogue, and an unflinching eye, Brown creates a world of stunted lives and thwarted hopes as relentless as anything in Dreiser or Dos Passos … A stark, often funny novel with a core as dark as a delta midnight.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Joe appalls, repels, but ultimately fascinates … Larry Brown is a writer whose language and imagination redeem the very worst life has to offer; a novelist of unusual power.” —William Kennedy, author of Ironweed

Praise for On Fire

“One of the finest books I know about blue-collar work in America, its rewards and frustrations … If you are among the tens of millions who have never read Brown, this is a perfect introduction.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times