Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Taylor Brown

Taylor Brown grew up on the Georgia coast. He has lived in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and the mountains of western North Carolina. His books include the story collection In the Season of Blood and Gold and the novels Fallen Land and The River of Kings. All three books were finalists for the Southern Book Prize.

Brown's new novel is Pride of Eden.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Brown's reply:
Lately, I've been a small tear reading nonfiction work that seems relevant to my new book, Pride of Eden -- at least philosophically. I think it started with James William Gibson's Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America, which was related to another project I'm currently working on. I found the book absolutely fascinating, even prophetic of our current times. I was hungry for more of his work, so I picked up his newest book, A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature, which really resonated with me -- one of those books that makes you nod your again and again while you read it, as if to say: "Yes, yes, yes!" And seem to express and articulate a lot of the underlying currents in Pride of Eden. That book made mention of Rick Bass's The Lost Grizzlies and Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, so I tore through those next. Most recently, I finished Underland by Robert Macfarlane, and found myself transported into deep time and the deeps of the earth -- highly recommended!
Visit Taylor Brown's website.

--Marshal Zeringue