Joe - by Larry Brown (Paperback)

About the Book

Set in the Mississippi backroads, this unflinchingly realistic novel focuses on the relationship between Gary Jones, the 15-year-old son of dissolute itinerant laborers and Joe Ransom, a hard-drinking ex-con who becomes his unlikely savior.

Book Synopsis

"Brilliant . . . Larry Brown has slapped his own fresh tattoo on the big right arm of Southern Lit." -The Washington Post Book WorldNow a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage, directed by David Gordon Green.Joe Ransom is a hard-drinking ex-con pushing fifty who just won't slow down--not in his pickup, not with a gun, and certainly not with women. Gary Jones estimates his own age to be about fifteen. Born luckless, he is the son of a hopeless, homeless wandering family, and he's desperate for a way out. When their paths cross, Joe offers him a chance just as his own chances have dwindled to almost nothing. Together they follow a twisting map to redemption--or ruin.

From the Back Cover

"Brilliant . . . Larry Brown has slapped his own fresh tattoo on the big right arm of Southern Lit." --The Washington Post Book World

Joe Ransom is a hard-drinking ex-con pushing fifty who just won't slow down--not in his pickup, not with a gun, and certainly not with women. Gary Jones estimates his own age to be about fifteen. Born luckless, he is the son of a hopeless, homeless wandering family, and he's desperate for a way out. When their paths cross, Joe offers him a chance just as his own chances have dwindled to almost nothing. Together they follow a twisting map to redemption--or ruin.

"Literature of the first order . . . Powerful stuff spun by a sure, patient hand . . . His characters just are. They call to mind the Joads in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and the pictures and people in James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It is an understated, powerful, beautiful evocation of a place, a time, a people. It is a book that will last." --Detroit Free Press

"Luminescent prose tempered by wit." --The New York Times Book Review

"Sinewy and lyrical." --Los Angeles Times

"Brown compels our admiration, Joe himself makes us care." --Newsweek

Review Quotes

"With this powerful novel of poverty-mired Mississippi... Brown comes into his own, illuminating the painful lives of his characters with compassion and eloquence." --Publishers Weekly

"Bright with pain and liquor, this raw and gritty novel ranks with the best hard-knocks, down-and-out work of Jim Thompson and Harry Crews. It's lean, mean, and original." --Kirkus Reviews

"Larry Brown is establishing himself as one of the most authentic literary voices of our generation. It's a voice framed, as many great voices have been, in the inflections of the South. It's a voice as true as a gun rack, unpretentious and uncorrupted, full of wit and sorrow." --Baltimore Evening Sun