Barry Hannah

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.

Barry Hannah's death on March 1 brought writers and fans out of the woodwork to mourn an irrevocable loss to American letters. Now, combining the best of the four story collections he published during his lifetime--Airships, Captain Maximus, Bats Out of Hell, and High Lonesome--and drawing from his final, never-before-seen manuscript, Long, Last, Happy will cement his legacy and serve as the definitive collection of his finest work in the story form. From his first collection, Airships, Barry Hannah made the literary world sit up and take notice. His ferocious, glittering prose and sui generis worldview introduced listeners to a literary New South--a fictional landscape that Vanity Fair Daily has summarized as covering "women, God, lust, race, nature, gay Confederates, good old boys, bad old boys, guns, animals, fishing, fighting, cars, pestilence, surrealism, gritty realism, the future, and the past...tossed together in glorious juxtapositions." Long, Last, Happy confirms Barry as one of our most brilliant voices.

Long, Last, Happy combines the best of the four story collections Barry Hannah published during his lifetime, four new stories from the final manuscripts he left behind, and one early-career story never published in volume form. Here, a man's estranged wife buzzes his house in her airplane, and a tailgate party can turn suddenly Biblical. The Confederate corporal in love with his General, the retired surgeon turning canine, the teenage boy rebelling against the "gloomy John Birch literature" of his surroundings, who ends up looking after an eccentric, beautiful lush--Hannah's characters occupy the intersection of heartbreak and surreal comedy. In his last works, set in a Mississippi college town terrorized by mysterious arson, the ghosts of history and devilments of love, lust, and drink walk the streets. Throughout, his ferocious, glittering prose maps a literary New South--a fictional landscape burning with racial unease, sex, love, hellraising, and a deep devotion to the art of storytelling.

Barry Hannah has long been considered one of the country's best living writers, whose singular voice and wicked genius for storytelling have earned him legions of diehard fans. His first novel in ten years, Yonder Stands Your Orphan opens with the establishment of an orphans' camp and the discovery of an abandoned car with two skeletons in the trunk. Man Mortimer, a pimp and casino pretty boy who resembles dead country singer Conway Twitty, has just been betrayed, and his revenge becomes a madness that will ravage the Mississippi community of Eagle Lake and give vent to his lifelong fascination with knives. The pompous young sheriff is useless at solving the crimes, so Mortimer's only challengers are three eccentric Christians -- a disgraced doctor and two ex-bikers, all prey to their addictions -- and an African-American Vietnam veteran whose wife is ill with cancer. Mortimer has a hold on each one of them -- a long-standing debt, a forgotten crime, or responsibilities they cannot yet desert. Yonder Stands Your Orphan paints a searing picture of the American South and establishes Barry Hannah once again as one of the most important writers in America.

Geronimo Rex, Barry Hannah's brilliant first novel, which was nominated for the National Book Award, is full of the rare verve and flawless turns of phrase that have defined his status as an American master. Roiling with love and torment, lunacy and desire, hilarity and tenderness, Geronimo Rex is the bildungsroman of an unlikely hero. Reared in gloomy Dream of Pines, Louisiana, whose pines have long since yielded to paper mills, Harry Monroe is ready to take on the world. Inspired by the great Geronimo's heroic rampage through the Old West, Harry puts on knee boots and a scarf and voyages out into the swamp of adolescence in the South of the 1950s and '60s. Along the way he is attacked by an unruly peacock; discovers women, rock 'n' roll, and jazz; and stalks a pervert white supremacist who fancies himself the next Henry Miller.

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

"Brian Griffin's first work of fiction, Sparkman in the Sky, is like Hemingway's In Our Time in that it can be read either as a collection of short stories or as a discontinuous novel. From story to story, themes gather meaning until in the last one they are resolved or transposed into a new key. The first-person narrator may be named Hal or Ian or Victor, but by the end all these narrators have fused into a collective exemplar of how things go in a certain place in our time. . . . It's no knock on Brian Griffin to say that he has learned from Hemingway, among others. After all, Miles Davis was no less gifted a musician, no less original, for having learned from Dizzy Gillespie. And Griffin has his own original qualities, his own subtleties, his own sly humor-even a gift for farce. . . . This book is way beyond promising."-The New York Times Book Review Brian Griffin grew up in the country near Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, in a family he describes as "infested by preachers, all Southern Baptists of the fundamentalist sort." He earned his B.A. in English from Middle Tennessee State University and his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Griffin teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee. He lives with his wife and children in Knoxville and works closely with a group there to promote interracial harmony in the inner city. Griffin's stories and poems have been well published in journals including Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Clockwatch Review, Snake Nation Review, and Southern Poetry Review. In addition to various short stories and poems, Griffin is currently at work on a novel.

Selected by Barry Hannah as the 1996 winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.

Love and torment, lunacy and desire, tenderness and war -- the stories in Bats Out of Hell provide a brilliant, dazzling odyssey into American life. Barry Hannah's reputation as a master of the short story, first established in 1978 with the publication of Airships, is magnified in this volatile, long-awaited collection of new stories. Astonishing in range and in the portrayal of the human heart, these fierce and radar-perfect stories give us individuals with whom hilarity and pain combine with true and startling clarity.

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."

Classic short stories by a beloved virtuoso of language, craft, and madness from the American South "His writing was anarchic and wonderfully funny. He sounded like what you'd get if you stirred three heaping teaspoons of Thomas Pynchon and Terry Southern into a jar of Eudora Welty."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times A Penguin Classic In the eight stories collected in Captain Maximus, Barry Hannah explores the lives of everymen and eccentrics alike in a showcase of his acerbic wit, dark humor, and stylistic flare. Hannah's unorthodox prose, characterized by unusual wordplay mixed with hints of Faulkner and Hemingway, captured the post-1970s malaise of American life, endeared him to literary circles, and left a lasting influence on the craft of countless authors. Featuring some of Hannah's finest work, from the fever dream "Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter" to his film treatment for Robert Altman "Power and Light," Captain Maximus is the perfect introduction to Barry Hannah. Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

"Wonderful in the ways of] Mark Twain, Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor."--Philip Roth WINNER OF THE PEN/MALAMUD AWARD - WINNER OF THE ARNOLD GINGRICH SHORT FICTION AWARD From "one of the most exciting voices of the post-Faulkner generation" (William Styron), Barry Hannah's triumphant classic Airships is a freewheeling and energetic collection of stories about love, loss, and legacy in the American South Lauded as one of the most important writers of the South's post-Faulkner generation, Barry Hannah was a master of the American short story. He introduced readers to a world in which Mississippi pier fisherman, small-town prevaricators, and veterans of American wars--Civil, Vietnam, and Gulf--met a mythic, mold-breaking voice with echoes of Beckett, bepop, and the Bible. Hailed by none other than Larry McMurtry as "the best young writer to appear in the South since Flannery O'Connor," Barry Hannah's Airships is a virtuosic ode to the art of storytelling. One of the most revered short story collections of the past fifty years, Airships remains a vital text in the history of the American short story. The award-winning contemporary classic features twenty wildly original, exuberant, often hilarious stories that celebrate the universal peculiarities of the new American South--a land of high school band contests where good old boys from Vicksburg are reunited in Vietnam, and petty nostalgia and the incessant pain of disappointed love prevail in spite of our worst efforts. Burning with racial unease, sex, love, and hell-raising, Airships is a testament to Hannah's status as a "mendacity-battling Colossus" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) and one our most brilliant writers to date. " Airships] struck me--as a great upheaval of our literary expectations, a liberating force . . . Hannah's language is audacious, bracing and insistent, often at the ragged brink of control. Words flash in ways no one had thought of before. Not ever."--Charles Frazier, Paste