Dirty Work: A Novel - Tapa dura

An unforgettable, unshakable novel. The New York Times Book Review The writing, the characters, and the plot are so compelling that you can't help but stay with the book until its conclusion. Washington Post Book World There has been no antiwar novel . . . quite like Larry Brown'sDirty Work. The New York Times One of the most powerful antiwar novels in American literature. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution A marvelous book . . . Brown's swift, intuitive dialogue explodes like a land mine and leaves the reader dizzy with shock. The Kansas City Star A real knockout. New York Newsday A powerful and original work all its own that moves along in short, staccato chapters with indisputably authentic language. The New York Times Stunning power . . . Dirty Workmakes the human cost of war achingly real. USA Today An unsparing book, at once brutal and compassionate, horrible, yet funny, too. The Philadelphia Inquirer Courageous . . . It's hard to imagine a more powerful effect than the one Brown creates with his attentive, unsparing prose. St. Louis Post-Dispatch [Brown] has created two fully realized, believable and often very funny characters . . . No one who reads this book is likely to forget them. The Houston Post A novel of the first order . . . A gem. The Washington Post"

Two Vietnam veterans meet twenty-two years after the war in a V.A. hospital. As these two men--one black, one white--tell their stories, they tell the story of the war itself and of all the lives it consumed, especially poor black lives.