Long, Last Happy
Book | Barry Hannah
A retrospective of exquisitely crafted stories from the one and only Barry Hannah.
Fire is central to the final stories of Barry Hannah's posthumous collection, Long, Last Happy, but all of the stories showcase how Hannah burned down and reconstructed a reader's expectations of a sentence, making the writer one of the most singular voices of the American South. Combining highlights of Hannah's career (think the groundbreaking Airships) with those written shortly before his death—recent stories detailing an outbreak of arson in Mississippi—the collection reveals the evolution of a daring literary stylist. Hannah subverts linguistic standards with shockingly strange syntax and rhythmic diction while his poetics celebrate the word with an oddball mix of pseudo-Biblical oratories, filthy colloquialisms, and Southern yarns. And as unusual as his language is, so are his characters: a piano-playing giant, an amateur missionary, and of course, a serial arsonist. Read Long, Last Happy from start to end, and you'll get a taste of Hannah's main concerns: men whose wives are always about to leave them, fishing, airplanes, and the strange passions that can burn an individual up.
-
Books Review
Airships
Barry Hannah -
Books Review
The Pugilist at Rest
Thom Jones -
TV & Film Review
Never Die: The Mad Genius of Barry Hannah
Nick Louvel
