Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary

Rebecca Brown is the author of seven novels, including The End of Youth, The Terrible Girls, and What Keeps Me Here, and her short stories are widely anthologized. Her novel The Gifts of the Body won a Lambda Literary Award and has been translated into several languages. Brown divides her time between Seattle and Vermont, where she is a faculty member in the Master of Fine Arts program at Goddard College.

""Rebecca Brown’s prose is like Shaker furniture: simple, strong, and useful, in the most beautiful sense. She writes here of loss and love with as much truth as necessary and far more poetry.""—Amy Bloom, author of Come to Me|""Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary is by someone who is (and should not be) the great secret of American letters, Rebecca Brown. [It is] what great books should be: relevant, urgent, honest, true.""—Dale Peck, Interview|“The way family crisis brings family memory into play; the way timing and delivery have a crucial role in how medical information is absorbed by family members; the way generational role-reversal introduces an element of make-believe into an all-too-real situation--Brown captures it all, with special attention to the unexpected episodes (hat selection, waiting room encounters) that make minutae loom large in any medical ordeal...the reader is simply carried forward toward a conclusion that both devastates emotionally and lays open the fragile nature of the flesh.”--The Seattle Times