"What is a week-end?"

“Boy, the weekends just didn’t last long enough.”

That’s the unnamed narrator—he goes by “Jimmy’s daddy”—in Larry Brown’s novel A Miracle of Catfish, published in 2007, three years after Brown’s untimely death. Jimmy’s daddy’s a bit of a lout, to be sure, but his complaints are entirely sympathetic, and roll as endlessly as a cotton field at dusk:

You got up and you went to work and you came home and went to bed and you spent all week fixing Towmotors, fixing spot-weld machines, fixing baloney san...