Praise for The Chugalug King
The ten stories collected in The Chugalug King & Other Stories by Andrew Brown are grisly, ironic, lyrical battles. From a parachute drop onto an evacuation road in Korea to fighting a forest fire to bull riding, boxing, hunting, and writing . . . these stories, carved from Brown’s thigh bone, have found their way to the page and to us.
Margaret Osburn, Johns Hopkins University, Memoir/Fiction Writing Instructor
About the Author
My writing has been shaped by my grandfathers and by my own ‘house gods.’ Born in the Depression and feeling the impact of loss during World War II, I was lucky nevertheless to be young before television, in a place where radio reception was poor but magazines and books were everywhere. When my maternal grandfather took me into his lap for a story, he didn’t read ‘See Spot Run.’ He read Don Quixote and Melville’s masterpiece, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener.’ From my other grandfather, I learned the story-telling art of the Lakota, where the maps for living always come in narrative form. My own house gods include Ernie Pyle, the absolute master of simple declarative sentences, detailed description and the power of human frailty; Ernest Hemingway, never equaled as a prose stylist; Shelby Foote, who encouraged me and taught me that history is not dates, places and shots fired, but stories of people in personal conflict; and the two Annie’s, Proulx and Dillard, whose writing never fails to inspire me to return to my yellow legal pad and my #2 Ticonderoga, and try harder to master my craft.
Andrew Brown discusses his Native American heritage, survival, and shares an excerpt from “The Chugalug King Goes Down the Road.”