Barry Hannah

Now considered a contemporary classic, Airships was honored by Esquire magazine with the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. The twenty stories in this collection are a fresh, exuberant celebration of the new American South -- a land of high school band contests, where good old boys from Vicksurg are reunited in Vietnam and petty nostalgia and the constant pain of disappointed love prevail. Airships is a striking demonstration of Barry Hannah's mature and original talent.

Airships

Nominated for the American Book Award, Ray is the bizarre, hilarious, and consistently adventurous story of a life on the edge. Dr. Ray--a womanizer, small-town drunk, vigilante, poet, adoring husband--is a man trying to make sense of life in the twentieth century. In flight from the death he dealt flying over Vietnam, Dr. Ray struggles with those bound to him by need, sickness, lunacy, by blood and by love.

Stories of America's underbelly include tales of voyeurs, killers, and lovers desperate for a sanctuary beyond good and evil

High Lonesome

Harry Monroe leaves his Louisiana hometown to travel around the South of the 1950s and 60s.

Geronimo Rex

Man Mortimer, "a pimp and casino playboy who resembles dead country singer Conway Twitty", seeks revenge against a small Mississippi community.

Yonder Stands Your Orphan

A collection of short stories features the tale of a man who is possessed by the spirit of an eighteenth-century noblewoman every time he plays chess

Bats Out of Hell

The life of a Mississippi-born-and-bred boy brings struggles for a "tiny but sincere" child who comes of age amidst staggering lust, hatred, love, and mayhem and who has a pivotal meeting with an old man

Boomerang

A Southerner odyssey revolving around Gramps, a hypochondriacal professor, a rock star, redneck Southerners, Korean veterans, and Jack, an old cafe owner whose friendship with Homer, the narrator, anchors the story

Hey Jack!

In 1910, in a frontier town rife with corruption, a colorful group of characters--a dwarf and a judge who own the town and the judge's daughter, Nandina, who loves Fernando, a gunfighter who vows to destroy the town--take part in a dark comedy of lust and

Never Die

Nightwatchmen

Two Novels

Boomerang ; Never Die

These stories portray people consumed by yearning, but devoid of hope.

Stories

Captain Maximus

Set in a small town in rural Mississippi, Hey Jack! expresses the full and epic range of love, just plain craziness, and despair of its inhabitants.Strong, original, tragic, and funny in the same voice--a writer of violent honesty and power in the creative Southern tradition.--Alfred Kazin

Combines the best from the author's four story collections as well as the final manuscript he left behind after his death.

New and Selected Stories

Long, Last, Happy

Three works from one of the most original and universally praised American writers of this century. Love and torment, lunacy and desire, tenderness and war--these stories provide a brilliant, dazzling odyssey into American life. No one but Barry Hannah could create these vivid worlds with such poetic detail.

“A wildly colorful, darkly comic, and ultimately sinister tale of madness and murder” from the award-winning master of Southern fiction (Library Journal). “Set in a lake community in the vicinity of Vicksburg, Miss., the story revolves around a fellow named Man Mortimer, a thief, pimp and murderer—and those are his good qualities—who physically resembles the late country singer Conway Twitty. On his trail are Byron Egan, a somewhat reformed biker-turned-preacher and prophet, and Max Raymond, a former doctor who plays saxophone in a bar band and has an attractive Cuban wife who sings, sometimes for the band, sometimes nude in her backyard. Meanwhile, the young town sheriff, distrusted since he hails from the North, manages to shock even the most degenerate denizens of the area with his affair with a luscious 72-year-old widow. The plot is kaleidoscopic, with flashes and slashes of wonder, humor and the macabre expertly mixed...Reading today's fiction is too often like eating stale bread. With Hannah, just imagine your most mouthwatering meal, take a double helping and you've come close to the pleasure of reading this book.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Maddeningly brilliant...a stunning assemblage of characters: ruffians, high rollers, heartbroken lushes, prostitutes, bikers-turned-preachers, dead ringers, drug addicts, third-rate porn stars, lounge lizards...They do not so much interact as collide, like atomic particles in a cyclotron.”—The Hartford Courant “An electrifying prose style, memorable characters, plot lines laced with violence and absurdity, and humor as black as an Ace comb...an expert navigator of the back roads of the human heart.”—The Denver Post “Like moonshine whisky, [Hannah’s fiction] packs quite a wallop.”—The Wall Street Journal

Presents seven autobiographical short stories together with a screen treatment written for Robert Altman that recounts a dark, weird tale about female hardhats struggling to stay alive in Seattle, Washington

Barry Hannah

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