Jason Brooks Brown

"Jason Brown is a master of the short story, and 'Wintering Over' is Brown at his finest," writes Cara Blue Adams, former Co-Editor of The Southern Review, in her introduction to this issue of Recommended Reading. "A forty-eight-year-old writer walks out on a book contract and retreats to a remote mill town in Maine to winter over with his young wife, a potter. Nathan and Charlotte are initially excited to escape from ordinary life and regard the winter as an adventure. But things are not going well between them and the isolation does not help. Nor does facing the demands of their art. And the end—well, the end. It’s a knockout. The story builds to a shattering revelation. It’s the kind of revelation that leaves the characters’ lives irrevocably changed, and that changes us, the people who bear witness."