What Keeps Me Here

For more than a decade Rebecca Brown has been one of the best-kept secrets in fiction writing. Her first four novels garnered praise among other writers, and last year her Gifts of the Body proved to a wide-readership that she was one of the finest stylists working today. Her prose is plain-spoken and effective, but carries a wallop; her newest book, What Keeps Me Here, a collection of stories, amazes us with its purity and emotional resonance. Whether she is writing about the relationship of a woman to her art, or the violence that haunts relationships, Brown moves and speaks through her characters like light through a window, or grace through a soul.