Airships - by Barry Hannah (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"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

Review Quotes

Praise for Airships:

"Anarchic and wonderfully funny . . . [Hannah sounds] like what you'd get if you stirred three heaping spoons of Thomas Pynchon and Terry Southern into a jar of Eudora Welty."--Dwight Garner, New York Times

"[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

"Reading Airships is like having lightning shark down at you in the dark. It illuminates where you are. It can scare you half to death . . . Lost in a New South that is everywhere and nowhere anymore, Hannah is always reaching, with the communal hunger of his heritage, back into the past (the Civil War), out into the future (apocalyptic Gotterdammerungs), and up to the universe."--Michael Malone, The Nation

"Barry Hannah is an original, and one of the most consistently exciting writers of the post-Faulkner generation. The stories in Airships are fiercely imagined fables in which hilarity and pain achieve a remarkable equipoise; sometimes funny, often terrifying, they are told in a captivating and unforgettable voice."--William Styron, Salon

"Strong, original, tragic, and funny in the same voice--a writer of violent honesty and power in the creative Southern tradition."--Alfred Kazin

"These stories are wonderful in the ways Mark Twain, Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor are wonderful when they are working the great vein of fierce and pitiless Southern comedy. The war stories in particular--joining, as they do for me, the clownish misery and colossal overkill of Vietnam to the American Civil War--are masterpieces of their kind. Hannah is more than just a new voice--he is half a dozen brilliant new voices."--Philip Roth

"Talents as broad as this thrive in novels but rarely take to the more constricting form of the short story. Airships proves Barry Hannah an exception . . . artfully rounded-off vignettes jumping with humor and menace . . . The stories bounce off and echo one another, giving the book an impact greater than the sum of its parts . . . Most young Southern writers resent being compared to such past giants as Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. In embracing the gothic mode, Hannah has planted himself firmly on their turf. On the evidence of this book, the shadows are not stunting his growth."--Time

"Exhilarating! Hannah is afraid of nothing in experience. He runs to meet life and to transform it."--Denis Donoghue

"Barry Hannah's writing is raw and exhilarating, tortured, radiant, vicious, aggressive, funny, and streaked with rage, pain and bright poetic truth."--Philadelphia Inquirer

"Hannah's stories are powerful, and powerfully original."--John Gardner

"One reads Barry Hannah and is amazed! Airships places him in the very first rank of American literary artists, and leaves us breathless with the force of its feeling."--James Dickey

"Barry Hannah is an original, vital talent."--Houston Chronicle

"Barry Hannah takes fiction by surprise-scenes, shocks, sounds and amazements: an explosive but meticulous originality."--Cynthia Ozick

About the Author

Barry Hannah (1942-2010) was the author of twelve books: Geronimo Rex, Airships, Ray, The Tennis Handsome, Nightwatchmen, Captain Maximus, Hey Jack, Boomerang, Never Die, Bats Out of Hell, High Lonesome, and Yonder Stands Your Orphan. His work was published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, the Southern Review, the Oxford American, Gulf Coast Review, and many other magazines. His achievements in fiction have been honored with an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and he was nominated for the American Book Award for Ray and the National Book Award for Geronimo Rex, which won the William Faulkner Prize. He has also received the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award for Airships, and his body of work has been recognized with the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction.