Joe

By Larry Brown,

Book cover of Joe

Book description

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

Now 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…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Joe as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I’m a sucker for a Southern gothic page-turner, particularly one that features such a complicated character like Joe Ransom who, when you first meet him, you don’t know if you should approach or just run away. Then bring teenage Gary into the mix with his troubled family backstory and this sheds a new light on Joe, and Gary as well, as the two traverse the muddy path to redemption.

Brown’s descriptive prose paints a harsh picture of the world, warts and all, yet it also has an underlying tragic beauty. 

From Peter's list on coming-of-age, slow burn thrillers.

Fiction as literature of the resistance? Larry Brown’s Joe is a top candidate for what I’d call The Great American Novel. There are many entries, of course: as many stories as there are communities, past, present, and even future. 

What I love about Joe is the simplicity of metaphor. A backwoods ne’er-do-well, Joe Ransom makes his living killing—literally—the great wild biodiversity hardwood powerhouse forests of the Mississippi bottomlands by injecting them with poison so that they die, and the rich forest can be converted to the homogenous, fast-growing, essentially sterile monoculture of southern yellow pine. His way of life—wild, reckless,…

From Rick's list on resistance.

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