Street Games — Rosellen Brown

Her gifts are limitless.... Rosellen Brown can do anything with language.—Cynthia Ozick All the stories in this remarkable cycle of stories are assigned an address. Each is also a separate life, yet part of the larger life that a neighborhood is; [this book] is an artist's inhabiting of other lives out of love, compassion, anger, and pain. Like the neighborhood, the stories are various. The mother of a damaged child tells us, 'I know how he dreams me. I know because I dream his dreams.' A male bureaucrat laments, 'I am too bored to move. No man can leave his wife for reasons like these....' In these stories, Rosellen Brown is Anglo, Puerto Rican, African American, Caucasian, male, female, parent, child. That is the artist's responsibility, the being of so many. Furthermore, it is a brilliantly written book that, in a period of fiction sniffing and snorting at itself, reminds us how the first rate will not go away.—from the foreword by Frederick Busch