In BROTHER DIONYSUS, veteran Sean Brendan-Brown explores military life and its aftermath through characters as strangely wrought as those peopling Sherwood Anderson's fiction and as real as those portrayed in Raymond Barthes' collection of cultural essays, Mythologies. Brendan-Brown's characters navigate the quagmire of life after military service, never failing to make a strong statement about the state of the culture, never failing to find humor in the most mind-boggling situations, and never failing to disappoint readers' desires to know what it's really like to live after going to war. Not since Raymond Carver has a writer more clearly shared the vagaries, joys, and comedy of human existence, while revealing the salvation in it for us all.