Margins
Good, Brother book cover
Good, Brother
2001
First Published
4.19
Average Rating
94
Number of Pages

Peter Markus' Good, Brother is a collection of short-short stories/prose poems that revolve around the lives of two virtually conjoined brothers and the mythical world that they fashion out of fish, mud, stars, the moon and a girl. Through acts of sublimely innocent brutality, they perpetually (and unconsciously) strive to preserve and continually renew their primordial creations—and their own primal child selves—while living in a town, with a dirty river running through it, that is seen by others as being just a shipwrecked sort of place. "In this spare and simple novel, Markus shapes and reshapes river and mud into a protean world perpetually reasserting itself through rituals that are at once down-home and arcane. There is a whole mythology here, generated privately between two brothers engaged in an always childlike (and for that reason all the more serious) task of creation. Good, Brother is like watching Raymond Roussel and Flannery O'Connor show up to the barn dance wearing hip waders and despite this still managing to outwhirl the best of them." —Brian Evenson, author of Altmann's Tongue

Avg Rating
4.19
Number of Ratings
73
5 STARS
45%
4 STARS
37%
3 STARS
14%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
4%
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Author

Peter Markus
Peter Markus
Author · 7 books
Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat, as well as five other books of fiction, the most recent of which is The Fish and the Not Fish, a Michigan Notable Book of 2015. His fiction has appeared widely in anthologies and journals including Chicago Review, Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Quarterly West, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, among many others. He was awarded a Kresge Arts in Detroit fellowship in 2012 and has taught for 20 years as a writer-in-residence with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project.
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