James Brown (author)
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
novelist who has also written short fiction and nonfiction.
His acclaimed memoir, The Los Angeles Diaries (HarperCollins, 2003) is an intimate portrait of his dysfunctional family
Dysfunctional family
A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often abuse on the part of individual members occur continually and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions. Children sometimes grow up in such families with the understanding that such an arrangement is...
, covering his childhood, Hollywood script meetings, his splintered marriage and life with his older brother, the actor Barry Brown (1951-78), and his sister, the actress Marilyn Brown (1953-98), who both committed suicide. The Los Angeles Diaries was named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Independent of London.
Novels and memoir
Living in San Jose, Brown studied creative writing at San Francisco State University and then attended the University of California, IrvineUniversity of California, Irvine
The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...
where he received an MFA degree in creative writing. His first short story was published when he was 16. His first novel, Going Fast (1977), published in a limited edition by Border Mountain Press, was reviewed by Merritt Clifton in Samisdat:
- Going nowhere at 16, bored and frustrated with school, aware of the world's flaws but feeling helpless to correct them, James Brown's hero/narrator, Virgil, idly picks up a spray paint can and says in bold script what he thinks of it all, on the side of an abandoned building. Accosted by two burly policement, in an instant he is Going Fast. First to reform school, where he meets JT, a confirmed incorrigible. Then into a low-paying, grimy job, living in the San Jose slum. Learning from JT, becoming his partner, Virg gradually claims his own destiny and identity, through ten rapidly moving, freewheeling days in and around San Francisco drug traffic... There are no bad or good guys, angels or devils, only people, who can be and often are both.
His second novel, Hot Wire (Arbor House, 1985), focuses on the struggles of a waitress and her three sons. The semi-autobiographical Final Performance (Sceptre, 1988), about two brothers in Los Angeles, was reviewed in Library Journal by Kimberly G. Allen, who commented, "Its characters imbued with an honest emotional depth, this work is compelling and profoundly moving."
He followed with The Second Story Theatre and Two Encores (Story Line Press, 1994), collecting together a novella and two short stories, "The Rat Boy" and "The Friend." His novel Lucky Town (Harcourt, 1994) follows a young boy who runs away from a foster home to meet his ex-con father. When The Los Angeles Diaries was published by HarperCollins in 2003, Publishers Weekly reviewed:
- Brown's tales are harrowing: at five, he and his mother traveled from their San Jose home to San Francisco, where she set an apartment building ablaze. Arson couldn't be proven, but she was imprisoned for tax evasion. At nine, he shared his first drink and high with his siblings; when he was 12, a neighbor attempted to molest him; by 30 he was an alcohol- and cocaine-addicted writer-in-residence. During his marriage's early years, Brown often left his wife to feed his addictions, repeatedly promising her he'd reform. Desperate to fuel his writing career, he attempted screenwriting, but everything he pitched seemed too dark. Brown's genius compels readers to sympathize with him in every instance. Juxtaposed with the shimmery unreality of Hollywood, these essays bitterly explore real life, an existence careening between great promise and utter devastation. Brown's revelations have no smugness or self-congratulation; they reek of remorse and desire, passion and futility. Brown flays open his own tortured skin looking for what blood beats beneath and why. The result is a grimly exquisite memoir that reads like a noir novel but grips unrelentingly like the hand of a homeless drunk begging for help.
His personal essays have appeared in GQ, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine and Ploughshares
Ploughshares
Ploughshares is an American literary magazine founded in 1971 by DeWitt Henry and Peter O'Malley in The Plough and Stars, an Irish pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1989, Ploughshares has been based at Emerson College in the heart of Boston...
. His writing has also been featured in Denver Quarterly and New England Review
New England Review
The New England Review is a quarterly literary magazine published by Middlebury College. Founded in New Hampshire in 1978 by poet, novelist, editor and professor Sydney Lea and poet Jay Parini, it was published as New England Review & Bread Loaf Quarterly from 1982 , until 1991 as a formal...
. He has been anthologized in Best American Sports Writing of 2006, Fathers and Sons and Sports: An Anthology of Great American Sports Writing (ESPN, 2008).
This River (Counterpoint Books, 2011) is a continuation of The Los Angeles Diaries, picking up where the first memoir ended with many of the same themes of family, addiction and recovery. Counterpoint is also reissuing the trade paperback of Los Angeles Diaries with a new introduction.
Awards
Brown received the Nelson AlgrenNelson Algren
Nelson Algren was an American writer.-Early life:Algren was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Goldie and Gerson Abraham. At the age of three he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois where they lived in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the South Side...
Award for Short Fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
Fellowship in fiction writing and a Chesterfield Film Writing Fellowship from Universal/Amblin Entertainment. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference is a writers' conference held every summer at the Bread Loaf Inn, near Bread Loaf Mountain, east of Middlebury, Vermont...
,
He teaches in the M.F.A. Program at California State University, San Bernardino
California State University, San Bernardino
California State University, San Bernardino, also known as Cal State San Bernardino or CSUSB is a public research university and one of the twenty three general campuses of the California State University system. The main campus sits on in the suburban University District of , United States, with...
and lives with his family in Lake Arrowhead, California
Lake Arrowhead, California
Lake Arrowhead is an unincorporated community and a census-designated place in the San Bernardino Mountains of San Bernardino County, California, within the San Bernardino National Forest, adjacent to Lake Arrowhead Reservoir...
.
Listen to
External links
- James Brown official site
- HarperCollins: interview
- CNN interview
- Entertainment Weekly: review of The Los Angeles Diaries
- "The Screenwriter", short story in Underground VoicesUnderground Voices MagazineUnderground Voices is an American literary magazine created in 2004. Based in Los Angeles, Underground Voices caters to edgy, raw, dark fiction, flash fiction, and poetry. The magazine also publishes the works of visual artists...
, originally in The Cocaine Chronicles (Akashic Books, 2005) - Interview with James Brown