Rebecca Brown – författare

The girls on the prowl in The Terrible Girls are indeed terrible—relentless in love, ruthless in betrayal. These thematically linked stories depict a contemporary Gothic world in which body parts are traded for love, wounds never heal, and self-sacrifice is often the only way out.

"In this brilliantly original work, Rebecca Brown gives us haunting parables of betrayal and love, of loss and resurrection, of loneliness and solidarity. Like a modern Djuna Barnes, Brown creates a language of telling that is fiercely beautiful and honest. This book is a love story unlike any you have read before. Its subversive and passionate transformation carry the lesbian literary voice onto the 21st century."—Joan Nestle

"A dry, witty, graceful—if savage—gift."—Mary Gaitskill

"The Terrible Girls comes from one of the fiercest, most potent, original writers around: a bloody flayer of skins, both other''s and her own . . . a work of possessed and persuasive visionary power."—The Listener

"The Terrible Girls is a powerful account of erotic love which exchanges the comforts of illusion for more complex and less certain rewards."—The Times Literary Supplement

Rebecca Brown is the winner of the 2003 Washington State Book Award. Her books, which are all published by City Lights, include: The Haunted House, The Terrible Girls, The End of Youth, The Last Time I Saw You, The Dogs and Annie Oakley''s Girl. She was awarded a Genius Award and grant from Seattle''s weekly magazine, The Stranger.

Rebecca Brown''s The Last Time I Saw You is a Finalist for the 2007 Ferro-Grumley Awards for LGBT Fiction!

In The Last Time I Saw You, author Rebecca Brown returns to the obsessive, darkly humorous voice that has earned her comparisons to Samuel Beckett and Djuna Barnes. Some of the tales in this collection are told in the scrappy, breathless voice of a naif on the verge of a terrible revelation. Others are noir-baroque monologues that collapse in on themselves as a speaker at last abandons a much-needed delusion. Intense, artfully crafted and oddly comic, the stories in this collection are bound to stay with you like an insistent, disturbing dream.

“A strange and wonderful first-person voice emerges from the stories of Rebecca Brown"—The New York Times

"Rebecca Brown''s newest collection of short fiction pulses with desires that cannot be attained—knowledge, understanding, quiescence, and love . . . The straightforward prose style belies Brown''s penchant for brilliant narrative, which at any moment can turn from the gentle and intimate to the violent and bizarre."—Utne Reader

"Brown’s imaginative, fierce collection of 12 stories (her 10th book, after The End of Youth) evokes the painful detritus of lesbian love affairs long over and the trickiness of memory.”—Publishers Weekly

"She is one of the few truly original modern lesbian writers, one who constantly pushes both her own boundaries and those of her readers. The Last Time I Saw You is an exhilarating reminder of just how thrilling difference can be . . . she reaches back into a time-honored tradition of mania that borders on the frightening, one that calls up Sappho''s laments to lost lovers, Stephen Gordon''s self-sacrificing delusions and the chilling compulsions of the women of Djuna Barnes'' Nightwood.”—Joy Parks, San Francisco Chronicle

"Every story is a stylistic and imaginative standout, but the most intriguing is ''Aspect of the Novel,'' a truly original exercise in essayistic fiction that contrasts the closeted career of British novelist E.M. Forster—who wrote his queerest novel ''Maurice,'' in 1914, but wouldn''t permit its publication until after his death in 1970—with the secrets that the lovers populating Brown’s unsentimental prose keep from one another."—Richard Labonte, BookMarks

Rebecca Brown is the winner of the 2003 Washington State Book Award. Her books include The Gifts of the Body, Excerpts From a Family Medical Dictionary, The Terrible Girls and The End of Youth.

"Everything and nothing is sacred in Rebecca Brown''s essays. Tongue, word, thought, and intellect all conspire in a free language love of living history, divination, sex, solitude and amusement. She is America''s only real rock ''n'' roll schoolteacher. Lessons layered with profundity and protracted parallels. Where old world religion, Gertrude Stein and Oreo cookies co-exist in an actual and mystic world of wonder."—Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth

"If Rebecca Brown''s talent for prose were any tighter, it would be a lyric—to a pop standard. An homage—a menage—to America, exposing what''s laid bare in a comic tragic redux. I laughed till it hurt."—Van Dyke Parks, Composer/Arranger

"Anyone who can get from the Eucharist, to a Necco Wafer, to the goo beween the Oreo wafers, to the Inquisition, to the goo between the legs of excited young women is a distant sibling of mine. She can dash and she can drift and she is not much interested in the really bad parts that might qualify as confession. She likes the float of quotidian living and I like to read the words upon which she floats."—Dave Hickey, author of Air Guitar

The impulse to tell our worst to a bunch of strangers has been fueling American self-hood for 300 years: there''s a direct line from the Puritan confession narrative to today''s lurid, inescapable exhibitionism. But whose stories are we telling?

This collection of mordant, poignant, and playful essays shows Rebecca Brown at the height of her imaginative and intuitive powers. A wry, incisive social and literary critique is couched in a gonzo mix of pop culture, autobiography, fiction, literary history, misremembered movie plots, and fantasy that plays with the notion of what it is to be “American.” Fantastical connections and unlikely meetings span the course of America’s cultural history in a manic remix, featuring appearances by Brian Wilson, Gertrude Stein, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Invisible Man, the Abligensian Crusade, John Wayne, Felix Mendelssohn, JFK, Shane, and God.

Rebecca Brown’s books include The Gifts of the Body, The Last Time I Saw You, The Haunted House, Terrible Girls, and The End of Youth.

Long out of print, Rebecca Brown’s brilliant debut novel explores the psychic repercussions of growing up in an alcoholic family, and the ways in which one woman’s past continues to inform and inhabit her life. Robin Daley’s childhood is dominated by a sense of impermanence: Her hard-drinking father disappears as suddenly and unexpectedly as he arrives. Her adulthood offers an escape, but strange things happen when the dark corners and locked rooms of family life are revealed.

Rebecca Brown is the author of The Gifts of the Body, The Last Time I Saw You, and The End of Youth. She lives in Seattle.

The nameless narrator of The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary lives in her studio apartment with a pack of Doberman pinchers. The dogs, led by the cruel, charismatic bitch named Miss Dog, alternate between being brutal attack animals and loyal companions, being real and otherworldly. Some chapters draw upon the ecstatic and horrifying visions of Christian mystics; others take place in the landscapes of familiar fairytales; others in the banal settings of the late-night pick-up bars or suburban picnics. The narrator uneasily inhabits these worlds until the dogs force her to take irrevocable action.

"A snarling attack on the fairytale form. A good girl''s fears of inadequacy materialize as a pack of vicious dogs."—Publishers Weekly

"A strange and wonderful first-person voice emerges from the stories of Rebecca Brown, who strips her language of convention to lay bare the ferocious rituals of love and need."—The New York Times

"Using unsentimental language that slices, pries and exposes layers of emotion and sexuality as a scalpel does a body, Brown veers into the uncharted territory."—The San Francisco Chronicle

"I read everything Rebecca Brown writes, watch for her books and hunt down her short stories. She is simply one of the best contemporary lesbian writers around."—Dorothy Allison

"A dry, witty, graceful—if savage—gift."—Mary Gaitskill

Rebecca Brown is the author of other fictions, including The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley’s Girl, and The Gifts of the Body. She is the winner of the 2003 Washington State Book Award, and was awarded a Genius Award and grant from Seattle''s weekly magazine, The Stranger. She lives in Seattle.

The End of Youth is a collection of 13 linked stories, essays and rants, about carrying on after youth''s hope is gone. In "Afraid of the Dark," a child learns that there is good reason to be afraid. The adolescent narrator of "Description of a Struggle" finds that love can be brutal. "The Smokers" examines an adult''s realization that longevity means seeing loved ones die. Written with the same spare and vivid beauty as her earlier award-winning works, The End of Youth is certain to win even wider acclaim.

"Throughout her writing career, Brown has exhibited a rare sensitivity in delving into difficult, uncomfortable material—death, disease, imperfect bodies and minds . . . in this slim book . . . there''s also humor and sensuality so intense it''s visionary . . . "—San Francisco Chronicle

"A strange and wonderful first-person voice emerges from the stories of Rebecca Brown, who strips her language of convention to lay bare the ferocious rituals of love and need."—The New York Times Book Review

"Rarer than the newness, the wit, the vivid readability, is the deep caring understanding, the wholeness, the truth with which this astonishing, haunting writer creates her people."—Tillie Olsen

"In The End of Youth, her new collection of stories and essays, Brown turns [a] gentle yet relentless gaze onto herself—or rather, onto scenes remembered from her childhood. The result is effortlessly perverse and frequently hilarious."—Booklist

Rebecca Brown is the author of The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley''s Girl, The Gifts of the Body and The Dogs. She lives in Seattle.