Good, Brother

by Peter Markus

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

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Poetry

94 pages

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Winnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zbyt rybia książka 🥴

[Black Coffee Press · Rating 1 out of 5]

Brother.
Yes, brother.
I read a book, brother.
Was it good, brother?
No.
No brother?
No.

[Charlie L · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is hard to comment on because it's so different from most books. There is a plot to this book: a slow-moving plot that does seem to plod and chug along like a muddy river would. But the book is much more about its language and sounds. It's all about repetition of words and phrases and sentences and ideas, and it does a great job with these. Because of this, reading it becomes a kind of surreal experience--I get drawn into the language and beautiful imagery and forget about the order of events, reality, or even what is happening in the book's reality. It all just flows along.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Rochelle Hurt's 'The Rusted City' is a novel of rust, then 'Good, Brother' is a novel of mud. Fish heads, mud girls, brotherhood, and a deep imagination for passing the days. This is a poetic fable. A parable of the mudmen. A woodland swamp of bubbling dirt. A twisted dream where the world slows to a choke.

[laila* · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book felt like someone sitting on my throat and head, very much as i lay dying kind of hot and stagnant

[Vincent Perrone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Wet. Muddy. Syntactically inventive. Totally lost in the river.

[Bob Schofield · Rating 4 out of 5]

more mud music, and this time w pictures! i read this back to back w The Singing Fish, so in many ways its all one book to me, but i have a sneaking suspicion that this one went deeper. got messier. and provided a few pieces about the moon, and i like that.

[Jamie Grefe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The musicality and mythic vision of these pieces both astounds and puzzles me. I'll be returning to Peter's work for years and years and years to come. This book is a river that I want to float away on.

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mini-novel about two brothers. Great stories, great writing.

[stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

i read this a while ago.
what a fine writer.

[Brent Legault · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book opened up new rivers in my mind; and shallow mud-oceans in my esophagus. It has me off fish as food for a while. But it's got me on to English, as a language, as an instrument of discovery.

[Melina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has a certain rough charm; it is Ken Kesey's "Sometimes a Great Notion" written in the tone of Flannery O'Connor, in Markus's intricately simple voice.