At long last, literary success
Most writers have a backstory of toiling in obscurity. For Peter Brown, obscurity had a specific location: a basement office in the Littauer Center at the end of a winding hallway, filled with enough spare computer parts to create a tech-savvy Frankenstein’s laboratory. For the past two decades, Brown has been a systems administrator for Harvard’s Economics Department, the go-to IT guy for Littauer faculty and staff. “I had pretty much concluded that I was never going to publish a book,” he said. Then, in 2010, something happened that his economist colleagues might call statistically improbable. Brown won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction — an award that came with a publishing contract from the University of North Texas Press. His collection of stories, “A Bright Soothing Noise,” showcases the funny, twisted imagination of a writer who, despite years in the hallowed halls of Harvard, hasn’t forgotten the stories of the down-and-out...