American Romances Essays Rebecca Brown by Rebecca Brown 9780872868243, 9780872864986, 0872868249, 0872864987 instant download after payment.

Everything & nothing is sacred in Rebecca Brown’s essays. Tongue, word, thought, & intellect all conspire in a free language love of living history, divination, sex, solitude & amusement. She is America’s only real rock ‘n’ roll schoolteacher. Lessons layered with profundity & protracted parallels. Where old world religion, Gertrude Stein & Oreo cookies co-exist in an actual & mystic world of wonder.–Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth

If Rebecca Brown’s talent for prose were any tighter, it would be a lyric–to a pop standard. An homage–a menage–to America, exposing what’s laid bare in a comic tragic redux. I laughed till it hurt.–Van Dyke Parks, Composer/Arranger

Anyone who can get from the Eucharist, to a Necco Wafer, to the goo beween the Oreo wafers, to the Inquisition, to the goo between the legs of excited young women is a distant sibling of mine. She can dash & she can drift & she is not much interested in the really bad parts that might qualify as confession. She likes the float of quotidian living & I like to read the words upon which she floats.–Dave Hickey, author of Air Guitar

The impulse to tell our worst to a bunch of strangers has been fueling American self-hood for 300 years: there’s a direct line from the Puritan confession narrative to today’s lurid, inescapable exhibitionism. But whose stories are we telling?

This collection of mordant, poignant, & playful essays shows Rebecca Brown at the height of her imaginative & intuitive powers. A wry, incisive social & literary critique is couched in a gonzo mix of pop culture, autobiography, fiction, literary history, misremembered movie plots, & fantasy that plays with the notion of what it is to be “American.” Fantastical connections & unlikely meetings span the course of America’s cultural history in a manic remix, featuring appearances by Brian Wilson, Gertrude Stein, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Invisible Man, the Abligensian Crusade, John Wayne,...