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Works
This River
"This River is a beautifully crafted and intensely moving book. Without artifice or pretension -- without false moves of any sort -- James Brown goes after the biggest literary game: death, love, children, degeneration, hopelessness, hope. I read this book straight through, in one spellbound sitting, and I will read it again. It is so good.” –Tim O’Brien, National Book Award winning author of Going After Cacciato, and The Things They Carried "Beautifully written, this is clear-eyed truth-telling by a man coming to terms with the best and worst in himself and others." - Booklist "James Brown is one of our most accomplished writers, and this brilliant memoir is among the finest of its kind." - B.H. Fairchild, author of the National Book Critics Circle - winning Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest and National Book Award Finalist for The Art of the Lathe "James Brown is a truth teller and here again he does not disappoint. His writing as always is lucid and unflinching. In laying bare his own soul, he makes of his work an act against loneliness, shot through with a sad wisdom." - Kem Nunn "Who could blame a reader, after James Frey's discredited "A Million Little Pieces," for being skeptical of the pyrotechnic literature of addiction? But James Brown, who teaches in the creative writing program at Cal State San Bernardino, is not a flashy writer. What is fascinating to watch is not a spectacle of decline — he writes of addiction to alcohol, heroin, meth, prescription drugs and antidepressants — but his geologic sculpting, this wearing away of a person, memories and all, down to some pure and simple core... "This River" continues where Brown's first memoir, "The Los Angeles Diaries," left off. It's molten stuff, the story of his efforts to control his river of rage." - The Los Angeles Times Book Review by Susan Salter Reynolds The Los Angeles Diaries
“Each chapter shows the tool marks of the well-crafted short story, carefully and even lovingly shaped and polished until it shines...The stories amount to a memoir of stunning intimacy and unforgettable impact." - The Los Angeles Times Book Review “This gemlike collection... materializes in such delicate strokes that the emerging theme becomes one of almost miraculous forgiveness... ” –San Francisco Chronicle (Best Books of the Year) "The Los Angeles Diaries is terrific. It's one of the toughest memoirs I've ever read, at once spare and startlingly, admirably unsparing. It glows with a dark luminescence. James Brown is a fine, fine writer." - Michael Chabon |