Advance praise for Iron Bridge Sunday and Other Stories...
Iron Bridge Sunday is the most beautiful collection of pitch perfect short stories that I have ever encountered---each one encompassing a whole existence. These hard lives are held together by love, cruelty, necessity, family lore and custom and hard work...and Les Brown writes the best dialogue I've ever read, hands down. I hope Iron Bridge Sunday will find the wide readership it deserves.
-Lee Smith, author of Saving Grace and News of the Spirit
Iron Bridge Sunday is a wonderful book. Brown is a master of regional dialect, and his humor is laugh out loud funny as his characters wend their way through their lives, but there is also a poignancy, and as we read the last powerful line, we feel the heartache of a place and people lost to time. Les Brown is one of our Appalachia's most gifted storytellers.
-Ron Rash, author of The Caretaker and Serena
Much has been made about the importance of place in southern American fiction. Les Brown's Iron Bridge Sunday and Other Stories masterfully weaves the tales of two generations of farm and otherwise rural families, and in doing so, creates the fictional Sycamore Cove, an unforgettable space that is charged with natural beauty and gifted with a landscape that is a challenge for humans to conquer. The setting is so true; one gets the feeling that these delightful stories could not have taken place anywhere.
-Tim Peeler, author of Knucklebear and Rought Beast
Les Brown's Iron Bridge Sunday and Other Stories couldn't be more engaging. A portrait of life in a Western North Carolina mountain cove in the previous century, the stories are funny, sad, harsh, even violent. Taken as a whole, they add up to a complex rendering of a hardscrabble time when people were more connected to the land and to each other. It's an evocation of a way of life mostly gone, written by someone who lived the life himself. In its sensibility, its empathy, its humor and its hard-earned tenderness, Iron Bridge Sunday and Other Stories is reminiscent of Fred Chappell's classic I Am One of You Forever.
-Tommy Hays, author of The Pleasure Was Mine and What I Came to Tell You
Also by Les Brown:
The Place Where Trees Had Names, Poems, 2020
Cold Forge, Poems, 2022
About the Author
Les Brown, PhD in biology, a native of the mountains of North Carolina, attended Appalachian State University and the University of Southern Mississippi. He is Professor Emeritus of Gardner-Webb University. His stories have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Moonshine Review, and Now and Then. A poet and visual artist, his work has also appeared in journals including Pinesong, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Kakalak, Main Street Rag, and Still: The Journal. A Pushcart Nominee, previous winner and finalist for the Poet Laureate Award of the NCPS, Les lives with his wife, Joyce, and their cat in Troutman, NC. His chapbooks, Cold Forge (2022), and A Place Where Trees Had Names, (2020), were published by Redhawk Publications.
