Allan Gurganus

Oldest living Confederate widow tells all

In 1980, a young Southern aristocrat arrives in New York to pursue his artistic ambitions, falling in love with both a gifted male composer and a failed debutante turned painter, until their brilliant circle of gifted and artistic friends falls prey to the ravages of AIDS. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

Plays Well With Others

A collection of eleven comic short stories by the author of The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All features tales of love and money among American WASPs. Reprint.

White People

Returning to his mythological Falls, North Carolina, home of Widow, the author presents three novellas set in today's South, a place revolutionized around freer sexuality, looser family ties and superior telecommunications.

Local Souls

The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus

The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor

A collection of two novellas and ten stories featuring all-white protagonists, crossing every class and gender line, entangled in the quintessential American comedy of the self-doubting majority

Narrator reflects on his experiences collecting funeral insurance premiums from poor blacks in North Carolina.

A Moral Tale

Blessed Assurance

A Novella

Decoy

Non abbiate paura

Presents three novellas set in mythical Falls, North Carolina, about a woman seeking the child she gave up for adoption, a high school valedictorian who disappears during a trip to Africa, and two married men whose friendship shifts toward desire.

Novellas

L'esca

In his widely read, prizewinning Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus gave fresh meaning to an overexplored American moment: 1860-65. He now turns that comic intensity and historical vision to another war zone: entry-level artistic Manhattan 1980-95. In his first novel since Widow, Gurganus offers us an indelible, addictive praise-song to New York's wild recent days, their invigorating peaks and lethal crashes. It's 1980, and Hartley Mims jr., a somewhat overbred Southerner, arrives in town to found his artistic career and find a Circle of brilliant friends. He soon discovers both Robert Christian Gustafson, archangelic boy composer of Symphony no. 1: The Titanic, and Alabama Byrnes, a failed Savannah debutante whose gigantic paintings reveal an outsized talent that she, five feet tall, can't always live up to. This circle--sexually venturesome, frequently hungry, hooked on courage, caffeine, and the promise of immortality--makes history and most everybody else. Their dramatic moment in New York history might've been a collaboration begun, as a toast, by Cole Porter and finished, as pure elegy, by Poe himself. Plays Well with Others is a fairy tale. It has a Legend's indoctrinating charm and hidden terrors. It chronicles a ragtag group of gifted kids who come to seek their fortunes; they find the low-paying joys of making art and the heady education only multiple erotic partners can provide. Having mythologized each other through the boom years, having commenced becoming "names," they suddenly encounter a brand-new disease like something out of fifth-rate sci-fi. Friends are soon questioning how much they really owe each other; they're left with the ancient consolation of one another's company and help. We watch this egotistic circle forge its single greatest masterwork: a healthy community. The novel, a sort of disco requiem-mass, divides itself into three symphonic movements: "Before," "After," and "After After." The work concludes in a homemade paradise that resembles Hartley Mims's own starter vision of all that seemed waiting--latent and convivial--in New York itself. This is a work that could've only been written now, in our age of medical advances, written about these unsuspecting unsung heroes of a medieval scourge's first endgame moves among us. Plays Well with Others becomes a hymn to the joys and woes of caretaking (for waning parents and young friends). Allan Gurganus has created a deeply engaging narrative about flawed, well-meaning people who seem lifted from our own address books. His book offers an obsessive love story, a complex vision of our recent past, and an emotional firestorm--a pandemic's long-awaited great novel.

Plays Well with Others

A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist A New York Times Notable Book In eleven glorious stories, Allan Gurganus, author of the highly acclaimed Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, gives heart-breaking and hilarious voice to the fears, desires, and triumphs of Americans—black and white, gay and straight, old and young, Northern and especially Southern. Here are war heroes bewildered by the complex negotiations of family life, former debutantes called upon to muster resources they never knew they had, vacationing senior citizens confronted by their own bravery, and married men brought up short by the marvelous possibilities of entirely different lives. Written with flair, wit, and deep humanity, this award-winning volume confirms Allan Gurganus as one of the finest writers of our time. The title novella of White People won the National Magazine Prize

Allan Gurganus

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