SOURCE: "A Fascination for All Things Foreign," in USA Today, March 29, 1996.

[In the review of Audrey Hepburn's Neck below, Donahue gives a brief description of the novel and provides background information on Brown.]

Sitting in a little bar in Osaka, Japan, long before his novel was even a glimmer in his eye, Alan Brown wrote down the title Audrey Hepburn's Neck. It came from a conversation with the bar's owner, who explained the reason he had festooned his establishment with posters and photographs of the big-eyed star.

"'It was her neck,' he told me," recalls Brown, 45, from his New York apartment.

The eternal appeal of the other, the foreign, the alien forms the underpinning of Brown's magical first novel, Audrey Hepburn's Neck. Brown writes from the perspective of Toshi, a 23-year-old Japanese comic-book artist living in Tokyo and working on a strip called Chocolate Girl. Taking English...