Long, Last, Happy
New and Collected Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A definitive, career-spanning, best-of tribute to a master of the modern American short story, featuring work from his final unpublished collection.
A fitting summation of one of America’s greatest short story masters, this towering tribute features stories from Airships, Captain Maximus, Bats Out of Hell, High Lonesome, and Barry Hannah’s final unfinished collection, Long, Last, Happy. The astonishingly varied stories in this collection span nearly five decades of unremitting brilliance. Praised for writing “the most consistently interesting sentences of any writer in America” (Sven Birkerts), Hannah’s ferocious, glittering prose and sui generis worldview introduced readers to a literary New South—a fictional landscape that encompasses “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” (Vanity Fair). Long, Last, Happy confirms Barry Hannah as one of our most brilliant voices.
“Hannah is the Jimi Hendrix of American short fiction; an electrifying Mark Twain—a wailing genius of literary twang, reverb, feedback, and general sonic unholiness that results in grace notes so piercing you heart melts like an overloaded amp.” —Interview
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This posthumous collection includes four new stories and shows why Hannah's regarded as one of the best. Hannah's wit is caustic, shot through with social commentary and gleefully interspersed with bursts of slapstick comedy. One of his best-known early stories, "Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt," still holds up more than 30 years later, with the landlady in her dilapidated house, lying crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. Hannah easily links themes, characters, and places particularly his longtime home of Oxford, Miss., and its flagship school, Ole Miss without drawing unnecessary attention to connections. The new stories "Fire Water," "Sick Soldier at Your Door," "Lastward, Deputy James," and "Out-tell the Teller" can be read as a set of interlocking narratives, each presenting a different angle on a series of arson attacks on small churches. The subject matter may be serious, but Hannah never abandons his sly grin just as he was able to shift, mid-story, between boyhood hijinks and the looming threat of Vietnam in "Testimony of Pilot." This collection reminds that Hannah, even in death, will always be "on the black and chrome Triumph, riding right into your face."
