Work
Brown's first novel, Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery (1994), received broad critical acclaim. In the New York Times, Margo Jefferson praised the books "seductive rhythmic murmur" In The Los Angeles Times, Charles Solomon noted the writer's "great sensitivity.". Reviewing the book for the Chicago Tribune, Charles Larson called the book a "triumph...much of its magnificence is the result of the author's decision to create imaginative voices other than his own," concluding "John Gregory Brown is both the beneficiary of and a worthy successor to our finest Southern writers." The novel received both the 1994 Lillian Smith Book Award and the United Kingdom's 1996 Steinbeck Award, for the year's best novel by a writer under forty years of age.
The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur, Brown's second book, was published in 1996. The Los Angeles Times called the novel "John Gregory Brown's gift of grace to us," and the Dallas Morning News wrote, "John Gregory Brown is a strong new voice in American—not just Southern—fiction, and his work deserves the widest possible audience.
Reviewing Brown's third novel, Audubon's Watch (2002), in the New York Times, novelist Stewart O'Nan praised Brown's "ambition and achievement," concluding, "This is a brazen performance that few authors would have the skill or the courage to risk." The novel received the 2002 Louisiana Endowment for The Humanities Award.
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Famous quotes containing the word work:
“We all agree now—by “we” I mean intelligent people under sixty—that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves. Unluckily, the matter does not end there: a rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.”
—Clive Bell (1881–1962)
“...I knew I wanted to be permanently self-supporting and I vaguely thought I might work somewhere in the realm of ideas. I felt that I had within me an undeveloped fount of ideas. I did not know exactly what my ideas were, but whatever they were I wanted to convert people to them.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
—Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)