Long Last Happy: New and Collected Stories

About this book

Recognized with a PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in short fiction Barry Hannah was a master of the American short story. He was also one of the most important writers of the Souths post-Faulkner generation introducing 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 bebop and the Bible. He has paved the way for a new generation of young writers and his death in March 2010 remains an irrevocable loss to American letters. Now combining the best of the four story cllections he published during his lifetime four new stories from the final manuscripts he left behind and one early-career story never published in volume form Long Last Happy is a feast for readers new and old. Here a mans 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---Hannahs 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 hell-raising and a deep devotion to the art of storytelling The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has called Hannah a "mendacity-battling Colossus." Long Last Happy serves as the definitive collection of Hannahs finest short fiction and confirms that he was one our most brilliant voices until the very end.