In The Last Time I Saw You, author Rebecca Brown returns to the obsessive, darkly humorous voice that has earned her comparisons to Samuel Beckett and Djuna Barnes. Some of the tales in this collection are told in the scrappy, breathless voice of a naïf on the verge of a terrible revelation. Others are noir-baroque monologues that collapse in on themselves as a speaker at last abandons a much-needed delusion. Intense, artfully crafted, and oddly comic, the stories in this collection are bound to stay with you like an insistent, disturbing dream.

Rebecca Brown is the winner of the 2003 Washington State Book Award. Her books include The Gifts of the Body, Excerpts From a Family Medical Dictionary, The Terrible Girls, and The End of Youth.

The End of Youth is a collection of 13 linked stories, essays and rants, about carrying on after youth's hope is gone. In 'Afraid of the Dark,' a child learns that there is good reason to be afraid. The adolescent narrator of 'Description of a Struggle' finds that love can be brutal. 'The Smokers' -examines an adult's realization that longevity means seeing loved ones die. Written with the same spare and vivid beauty as her earlier award-winning works, The End of Youth is certain to win even wider acclaim.

Rebecca Brown is the author of The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley's Girl, The Gifts of the Body and The Dogs. She lives in Seattle.

Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary is an intimate, exquisite, and true account of what it is to help a parent die. After her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, former home care worker and award-winning writer Rebecca Brown cared for her mother during the last six months of her life. This spare, unsentimental book comes out of that experience. In short chapters headed by definitions of medical terms, she confronts anemia, chemotherapy, metastasis, cremation. Brown's is a poignant and unflinching story of how one family coped with loss and learned about the longevity of love.

The Wisconsin edition is for sale only in North America.

The nameless narrator of The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary lives in her studio apartment with a pack of Doberman pinchers. The dogs, led by the cruel, charismatic bitch named Miss Dog, alternate between being brutal attack animals and loyal companions, being real and otherworldly. Some chapters draw upon the ecstatic and horrifying visions of Christian mystics; others take place in the landscapes of familiar fairytales; others in the banal settings of the late-night pick-up bars or suburban picnics. The narrator uneasily inhabits these worlds until the dogs force her to take irrevocable action. Rebecca Brown is the author of other fictions, including The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley's Girl, and The Gifts of the Body. She lives in Seattle.

The girls on the prowl in The Terrible Girls are indeed terrible—relentless in love, ruthless in betrayal. These thematically linked stories depict a contemporary Gothic world in which body parts are traded for love, wounds never heal, and self-sacrifice is often the only way out.