Award-winning fiction writer Jason Brown's Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work is a linked collection of beautifully haunted, violent, and wry stories set in the densely forested lands of northern New England. In these tales of forbidden love, runaway children, patrimony, alcoholism, class, inheritance, and survival, Brown's elegant prose emits both quiet despair and a poignant sense of hope and redemption. These vivid accounts of troubled lives combine the powerful small-town family drama of Andre Dubus and Russell Banks, the dark wit and calamity of Denis Johnson, and the New England Gothic of Nathaniel Hawthorne.