The Uncertain Hour
“If I say that Jesse Browner’s “The Uncertain Hour” is a truly original work of art, I hope I won’t scare anyone off. It’s also the most engrossing page-turner I’ve picked up in a long while.” Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours
The Duchess Who Wouldn’t Sit Down: An Informal History of Hospitality (Bloomsbury 2003)
Four thousand years ago, an Akkadian father offered his son this advice: “Give good food to eat, beer to drink, grant what is requested, provide for and treat with honor.” Today, we still think of hospitality much the same way – as a simple expression of our generosity and humanity. In truth, something far darker and more elemental often lurks behind a host’s best intentions. The Duchess Who Wouldn’t Sit Down is dedicated to a new understanding of the traditions and history of hospitality. Jesse Browner leads the way back through Western civilization, from a present-day poker game, where a cunning chef disarms his rivals with perfect sandwiches, to the ancient Greeks, whose gods punished or exalted the mortals according to their excellence as hosts. Along the way, we visit the summer home of Adolf Hitler, a staunch vegetarian who liked to lecture his guests on the horrors of the slaughterhouse. We meet Lady Ottoline Morrell, the hapless heiress who opened her home to Britain’s greatest writers, only to be publicly lampooned in their novels. We catch John James Audubon in the act of playing a cruel prank on a defenseless guest. We explore the gilded cage of Louis XIV’s Versailles, where an ambitious duchess preferred to destroy all her social prospects rather than sit on a folding stool. And we try to survive supper with the Roman emperors, for whom classic dinner-table entertainment was a good poisoning.
Praise for The Duchess Who Wouldn’t Sit Down
“The Duchess Who Wouldn’t Sit Down is an absolute delight, as erudite as it is witty, as witty as it is charming. The only text I think I can compare it to is Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste, yet Mr. Browner is infinitely more engaging. The book combines tremendous learning with very human tenderness, and I felt privileged to read it.” Lisa Hilton, author of Athenais
“The Duchess Who Wouldn’t Sit Down, which is Browner’s third book after two novels, must be part of a long campaign to find this talented writer the wide audience he deserves. Don’t bet against him.” Carol Doup Miller, Raleigh News and Observer
“A thought-provoking gallop through several millennia and numerous cultures in search of hospitality – the concept and the practice. Often surprising, always entertaining.” Alan Davidson, author of The Oxford Companion to Food
Turnaway (Random House 1996)
Somewhere between the Bronx shoreline and the tip of Manhattan is Turnaway, an uncharted island inhabited solely by an elderly German-Jewish doctor and his young ward, Elias Hutchinson, who fancies himself to be the last surviving descendant of a decimated Native American tribe. When a weekend sailor, Ben Givens – a cynical, embittered shipwreck of a man – washes up on their beach after a freak storm, this fanciful kingdom is subtly disrupted, altering its peaceful balance of man, nature, and dreams. Prompted by Givens, Elias leaves his cloistered existence to undertake a perilous journey of temptation to midtown, where his search for the redemptor of his people undermines his gentle faith in his own invulnerability.
Praise for Turnaway
“Browner’s first novel was a savage satire of modern life. His second, more meditative, is nonetheless a powerful, ingenious work, further evidence that a writer of considerable talent has emerged.” Kirkus Reviews
“Turnaway is, in its historical aspects, an enthralling book… Jesse Browner writes well. There is hardly a limit to what he might someday achieve.” D. Keith Mano, The New York Times
“Browner pulls off the audacious feat of creating a wickedly comic tale that's also a heartfelt paean to the glories of friendship and nostalgia, and to the mythmaking impulse in us all.” Publishers Weekly
Guided by clues in his grandfather’s
diary, the world-weary bon vivant Aaron X travels to the dense forests
of Romania’s Carpathian mountains in search of the mythic Conglomeros
– in appearance a hideous monster, but by nature a gently trusting
and intelligent soul. The Conglomeros touches a responsive chord in Aaron’s
jaded heart; unable to give up the one beautiful thing in his life, he
rashly smuggles the monster home to New York. Aaron has great plans for
the creature: He will care for it, teach it to speak, turn it into the
perfect, loyal companion. But all of his well-intentioned plans go awry,
and Aaron, realizing – too late? – that he has somehow corrupted
the sublime being, now has but one purpose in life: to untame and set
free the thing he loves most.
Praise for Conglomeros
“Drawing on Poe and Kafka, Browner weaves a darkly haunting parable that speaks simultaneously of the death of beauty and goodness in the world… and the huge, untapped potential of the human unconscious.” Publisher’s Weekly
“Conglomeros owes so much to so many predecessors – from Frankenstein to Lolita to E.T. – that one almost doesn’t know where to begin in terms of chronicling its allusiveness. But this first novel’s cultural antecedents are handled with such deftness and slyness, and synthesized to such good purpose, that the overall effect is beguiling: a collage of familiar images that becomes a single new thing.” Jim Shepard, L.A. Times
Selected translations
Jean Cocteau, Diary of an Unknown (Paragon
House, 1988)
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to Merline (Paragon House, 1989)
Paul Eluard, Letters to Gala (Paragon House, 1989)
Jean Cocteau, Souvenir Portraits (Paragon House, 1990)
Frédéric Vitoux, Céline: A Biography (Paragon
House, 1992)
Matthieu Ricard, Happiness (Little, Brown 2006)