“Around the time I started to get serious about writing, a friend gave me a copy of Big Bad Love and everything changed. The stories were effortlessly honest, muscular and lean; quick and devastatingly beautiful—thoroughbreds, all of them.
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Equally compelling was his biography—a guy who had no formal training in writing. He decided to be a writer and taught himself. Larry Brown made me feel like it was possible, like he had just handed me a driver’s license. The day after he died, someone sent me a note saying they were sorry because they knew how much Mr. Brown meant to me. I didn’t know he had died. It broke my heart.
“On my book shelf, which is in no [deliberate] order, there’s a Bible and then there is Larry Brown who is followed by Faulkner.”
– Jason Tinney, author, blues harp player; Ripple Meets the Deep (CityLit Press, 2014), excerpted by Rafael Alvarez, contributor to The Local Voice and author, Tales From the Holy Land
