The Last Time I Saw You
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.
Author: Rebecca Brown
Publisher: City Lights Books
Published: 01/01/2006
Pages: 136
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.25lbs
Size: 7.34h x 5.08w x 0.34d
ISBN: 9780872864474
Award: Triangle Awards - Nominee
Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/16/2006 pg. 38
Lambda Book Report 04/01/2006 pg. 18
About the Author
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.