James Brown

"This River is a beautifully crafted and intensely moving book. Without artifice or pretension -- without false moves of any sort -- James Brown goes after the biggest literary game: death, love, children, degeneration, hopelessness, hope. I read this book straight through, in one spellbound sitting, and I will read it again in a week or two. It is so good.”

–Tim O’Brien, National Book Award winning author of Going After Cacciato, and The Things They Carried

“James Brown is a truth teller and here again he does not disappoint. His writing as always is lucid and unflinching. In laying bare his own soul, he makes of his work an act against loneliness, shot through with a sad wisdom.”

–Kem Nunn, author of the L.A. Times Book Award winner for Tijuana Straits, and of the National Book Award nominated Tapping the Source

“As I was reading James Brown’s new book, This River, I thought, I did not know anybody wrote like this anymore. At any moment, my breath shortening, I thought the page would combust and explode in my hands. Not just for what I was being told, but also for the way of the telling, for how tightly crafted, limpid, economical the sentences. The way they build power and come from beneath, the way they disappear inside your mind and become your mind in seamless transport.

There are few artists who have loitered at the gates of hell and maintained their craft. Few artists who have given in to the demons and returned to tell about it. The journey empties them and the demons destroy them and what they have learned and we need to know is forever lost to us. Well, here is one of them where that is not so.

I am immediately reminded of William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness and John Berryman’s Recovery. Both are famous and important books, but neither is so self-lacerating, so honest, so truthful as Jim’s book. Neither demands so much of the reader and knows the reader is willing for the more and not the less. Neither is so inside out. Neither gives so much and gives again.

Sometimes a way to gauge the quality of a creation is to think about what it took, what was overcome, what price it extracted. In this case, the proof is in your hands. This River is raw and palpable and beats like a heart. Brown gave everything he had: infinite strength, exacting discipline, fearsome courage...When you put this book down, trust me, you will think about it for a long time.”

–Robert Olmstead, author of the national bestseller Coal Black Horse and winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award

"James Brown has shaped from the English language something rather different: an exacting, muscular prose both tender and unforgiving, rigorously concise in its refusal to dilute the darkest realities and yet capacious and nuanced in its pursuit of redemption and familial love. He is one of our most accomplished writers, and this brilliant memoir is among the finest of its kind."

- B.H. Fairchild, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award winning Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, and National Book Award nominated The Art of the Lathe

“This is a harrowing and beautiful memoir, shot through with excess and violence and shocking, heart-stopping compassion. James Brown renders his extraordinary life in tight, muscular prose, sparing neither himself nor the reader the hard lessons of addiction and recovery. The result is an unforgettable book, stripped of irony and pretense, that lays bare the darkness – and the light – in all of us.”

–Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi: Stories

"James Brown's provocative, beautifully written and gut wrenching memoir illuminates a life rich in those elemental passions that govern our lives -anger, fear, depression, death, and love. Sometimes tender, sometimes manic, but always wise and insightful, This River never falters in the muscularity of the writing, all of it filled with riveting details that kept this reader turning the pages as fast as he could read them. Here is a remarkable life, one that is both devastating and inspiring. Any ordinary man experiencing what Brown went through would doubtless have died long ago, but Brown not only survived, he triumphed and in ways no one would have predicted, least of all, perhaps, Brown himself. From a junky/​alcoholic to award-winning writer and university professor, Brown has proven once again that there are no oracles when it comes to foretelling the inevitable course of any man's journey. Mesmerizing from beginning to end. Unforgettable."

- Duff Brenna, author of The Book of Mamie, winner of the AWP Award for Best Novel, and Too Cool, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year

“Sequel to Brown’s indelible The Los Angeles Diaries, [This River] is equally powerful and complete in itself. Brown’s profoundly authentic story of Brown, survivor of sibling suicides, drinker, user, writer, teacher, father, husband, is as fully imagined as it is unsparing. In speaking from the edge of loss, Brown’s eloquence recalls Robert Lowell’s 'my eyes have seen what my hand did.'”

- DeWitt Henry, author of Safe Suicide