You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe

You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe: an essay cycle on the four seasons, time, love, death, and growing up

In her new nonfiction work You Tell the Stories You Need To Believe, queer novelist Rebecca Brown turns her attention to life’s biggest questions: time, love, and how we endure.

Since 1984, and most known for a novel written and set during the AIDS crisis (The Gifts of the Body), Rebecca Brown has been on the forefront of the avant-garde of American letters.

You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe is an exploration of the meaning of life—as told through the cycles of the year, and the art that has been produced about each of the seasons.

As Brown fans know, her distinctive sentences are reason enough to read her. One of the gifts of this book is getting to read about the artists who inspire her—from Melville to Denise Levertov, from Stravinsky to the Monkees. Not to mention the cunning and imaginative ways mythology and religion enter the mix.

Advance praise for You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe:

“There are no easy comparisons for this moving, strange, immensely brilliant book, save that, as with other eccentric miniaturists—Walser or Dickinson or Davis—brevity of expression belies vastness of thought. A reflection on the seasons, a meditation on time, an autobiography filtered through art, You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe is finally—though there’s nothing conventionally pious about it—a prayer, its devotion bent equally toward the luminous particulars of the world and the ever deferred, ever hoped-for gifts of the spirit. I loved it more than I can say.” – Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You

“Rebecca Brown is a companionable writer, totally honest, cultured in an unintimidating way, freely associating with total freedom and virtuoso associations.” – Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story and Genet: A Biography

“A poet has found a new way to praise the seasons! In each time of year, with its promise or its feared return, its arrival somehow always new, its disillusions and startling fulfillments, its frightening, beautiful mirror in the seasons of human life, Rebecca Brown has found the shape of time itself and found it good.” – Valerie Trueblood, author of Terrarium: New and Selected Stories and Search Party: Stores of Rescue

Paperback ISBN: 978-1633981348, 100 pages, $15
Published April 2022 • size: 5 x 7

Praise for Rebecca Brown:

“Brown is a great writer… Every chapter… is beautifully composed, resonant, tough. It reads as dark but also true and moving… readable and untakeable at once.” -Ali Smith, The Guardian (UK)

“Ripe and imaginative, often funny, and sliding craftily between fact and wishful fantasy.” - The Sunday Times (London)

“A strange and wonderful first-person voice emerges from the stories of Rebecca Brown, who strips her language of convention to lay bare the ferocious rituals of love and need. - The New York Times Book Review