Jason Brooks Brown

The narrators of Brown’s second book of stories are mostly watchers—witnesses to sordid events in the fictional town of Vaughn, Maine. Through their eyes, the familiar routines of small-town life are transmogrified into emblematic ugliness. Some of the stories deal with Maine’s twin preoccupations with boats and lumber, but the strongest anatomize the town with stunning emotional precision. In the title story, the Old Vaughn Day parade seems like a bacchanalia to a young boy who sees his father drunk and in costume as a drunken Zulu warrior—Brown’s point being less the rottenness of the provinces than the fevered nature of adolescence. ♦ The New Yorker