Rebecca Brown, The Gifts of the Body

Lies Xhonneux

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1994

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

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The Gifts of the Body

(1994), the sixth book by the American lesbian author Rebecca Brown, is this writer’s most widely successful work and it earned her most mainstream coverage.

The Gifts of the Body

won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award the year it was published; the Lambda Literary Award and the Boston Book Review Award followed in 1995. Brown’s autobiographically inspired novel relates the experiences of a home-care worker assisting people with AIDS (PWAs) via Urban Community Services, and her no-frills style of narration renders these people’s lives and deaths in an anti-sentimental yet emotionally powerful way.

Readers of The Gifts of the Body receive relatively little clues as to the temporal or spatial setting of Brown’s novel, which can nevertheless be

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1955 words

Citation: Xhonneux, Lies. "The Gifts of the Body". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 October 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=34708, accessed 27 November 2024.]

Rebecca Brown, The Gifts of the Body

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