Geronimo Rex

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.

Called the best fiction writer to appear in the South since Flannery O'Connor (Larry McMurtry), acclaimed author Hannah ("Airships, Bats Out of Hell") returns with an all-new collection of short stories.

Barry Hannah has been acclaimed by Larry McMurtry as "the best fiction writer to appear in the South since Flannery O'Connor." In his new novel, the first since 1991's Never Die, he again displays the master craftsmanship and wickedly brilliant storytelling that have earned him a deserved reputation as a modern master. In Yonder Stands Your Orphan, denizens of a lake community near Vicksburg are beset by madness, murder, and sin in the form of one Man Mortimer, a creature of the casinos who resembles dead country singer Conway Twitty. A killer who has turned mean and sick, he will visit upon this town a wreckage of biblical proportions. The young sheriff is confounded by Mortimer and distracted by his passion for a lovely seventy-two-year-old widow. Only Max Raymond, a weak Christian saxophonist, stands between Mortimer and his further depredations. But who will die, who will burn? Yonder Stands Your Orphan is a tour de force that confirms Barry Hannah's reputation — as William Styron wrote in Salon — "an original, and one of the most consistently exciting writers of the post-Faulkner generation."

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.

High Lonesome is a darkly comic, fiercely tragic, and strikingly original odyssey into American life. This collection by the author of Airships and Bats Out of Hell explores lost moments in time with intensity, emotion, and an eye to the past. In "Uncle High Lonesome," a young man recalls his Uncle Peter, whose even temper was marred only by his drinking binges, which would unleash moments of rage hinting at his much deeper distress. Fishing is transformed into a life-altering, almost mystical event in "A Creature in the Bay of St. Louis," when a huge fish caught on a line threatens to pull a young boy, and his entire world with him, underwater and out to sea. And in "Snerd and Niggero," a deep friendship between two men is inspired by the loss of a woman they both loved, a woman who was mistress to one and wife to the other. Viewed through memory and time's distance, Hannah's characters are brightly illuminated figures from a lost time, whose occassionally bleak lives are still uncommonly true.