Rosellen Brown

Through the persona of Cora Fry, a wife and mother living in a small New Hampshire town, Rosellen Brown explores the ambivalent ties of love, loyalty, marriage, and family in a series of related poems. This volume includes the entire text of "Cora Fry "(1977), a kind of dramatic monologue, written in spare, simple lines, which describes the young woman's daily life and troubled marriage. A sequel of newer poems, "Cora Fry's Pillow Book" (1994), confronts the challenges that come with a woman's growth toward middle age, reflecting an older Cora's place in her family, community, and the larger world.

The Lake on Fire is an epic narrative that begins among 19th century Jewish immigrants on a failing Wisconsin farm. Dazzled by lore of the American dream, Chaya and her strange, brilliant, young brother Asher stow away to Chicago; what they discover there, however, is a Gilded Age as empty a facade as the beautiful Columbian Exposition luring thousands to Lake Michigan's shore. The pair scrapes together a meager living--Chaya in a cigar factory; Asher, roaming the city and stealing books and jewelry to share with the poor, until they find different paths of escape. An examination of family, love, and revolution, this profound tale resonates eerily with today's current events and tumultuous social landscape. The Lake on Fire is robust, gleaming, and grimy all at once, proving that celebrated author Rosellen Brown is back with a story as luminous as ever.

The New York Times bestseller from Rosellen Brown, Before and After--the basis for the major film of the same name starring Meryl Streep Liam Neeson--tells the extraordinary story of a family's struggle to survive the throes of a tragedy. Carolyn and Ben Reiser moved to Hyland, New Hampshire with their two children for the comforts of rural life. But when the local police chief comes looking for their seventeen-year-old son Jacob to question him about the brutal murder of his girlfriend, the Reisers' lives begin to unravel. A compelling story that will capture you in the opening scene and hold you through its shocking conclusion, Before and After is a stunning novel that pits parent against parent, brother against sister, family against community, blood loyalty against law-as "deep questions of loyalty, honesty, and love are forced to the surface in this psychologically riveting tale." (Library Journal) A New York Times Notable Book

Winner of the 2001 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction "This novel’s poignancy, I think, comes from the paradoxical confrontation between innocence and experience these Asian strivers are caught in—at the same time that they are rendered childlike by ignorance of their new culture, we know they have been singed and seared, and therefore secretly toughened. Immigration is such a significant phenomenon right now that this tension between competency and confusion, maturity and infantilization is an enormously fecund subject for a novelist with a well-developed sense of irony."—From the Foreword by Rosellen Brown In an essay written for his ESL class, a young student describes his flight from Vietnam at the age of 12, in a fishing boat with three friends. They were beaten by Thai pirates, fell faint with hunger and pain, until they were "pushed to the kind shore by a finger of God." The phrase evokes an overriding metaphor for this resonant first novel by Kate Gadbow, in which a community of Vietnamese and Hmong refugees struggles to maintain balance between the world they fled and the one they are currently negotiating in Missoula, Montana. Gadbow meshes the lives of these refugees with that of the book’s narrator Janet Hunter, a teacher struggling to manage contemporary life, with a failed marriage and a string of disappointments haunting her own past. In a deceptively simple prose style that reads like easy conversation, and with an admirable lack of sentimentality, Kate Gadbow has written a remarkable novel depicting the clash of cultures and the difficult realities inherent to a world given only to constant change, where the harbor of a kind shore seems frustratingly out of reach. Kate Gadbow directs the Creative Writing Program and teaches undergraduate fiction classes at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she lives with her husband, journalist Daryl Gadbow.

"All the stories in this remarkable cycle of stories are assigned an address. Each is also a separate life, yet part of the larger life that a neighborhood is; [this book] is an artist's inhabiting of other lives out of love, compassion, anger, and pain. Like the neighborhood, the stories are various. The mother of a damaged child tells us, 'I know how he dreams me. I know because I dream his dreams.' A male bureaucrat laments, 'I am too bored to move. No man can leave his wife for reasons like these....' In these stories, Rosellen Brown is Anglo, Puerto Rican, African American, Caucasian, male, female, parent, child. That is the artist's responsibility, the being of so many. Furthermore, it is a brilliantly written book that, in a period of fiction sniffing and snorting at itself, reminds us how the first rate will not go away." from the foreword by Frederick Busch"

A moving story about estrangement and intimacy, race and privilege, identity and belonging from the bestselling author of Before and After Miriam Vener feels trapped in the comfortable white middle-class life she leads with her family in Houston during the 1980s. That life suddenly shatters with the appearance, after almost eighteen years, of Veronica (Ronnee), her biracial daughter born in Mississippi in the sixties when Miriam was a civil rights activist. Hot tempered, sensitive, manipulative and deeply hurt at her mother's disappearance from her life, Ronnee has been raised by her father, a formerly brilliant college professor who forbade her to see her white mother. Half a Heart charts the emotionally fraught terrain of the mother and daughter's reunion and Ronnee's divided sense of self and loyalty. With which family, and which race, does she identify? How does all this affect her relationships with her newly discovered half-sister, her white boyfriend, and the father she is rebelling against? Half a Heart is a searingly honest novel of public and private ideals betrayed and hopes reignited by one of our foremost novelists.

Laura and Dan Courser are a less than perfect, but deeply passionate couple with two young children and lots of plans. Until Dan, displaying the boyish bravado that made Laura fall in love with him, takes the tiller of a boat he can't handle and causes the accident that shatters their lives.Suddenly there are no more ordinary days or nights. And, in a story filled with astonishing revelations, we witness two people wrestling with a marriage in which all the rules are changed, confronting the guilt and anger, devotion and desire that don't merely survive...but can help heal the wounded heart.Rosellen Brown creates a compelling portrayal of a family torn apart--and perhaps put back together again--by love.