William Gay’s picaresque The Lost Country follows four people on the road: a young sailor hitchhiking to Tennessee from the West Coast, a one-armed con-man, a kid dodging the law, and an enigmatic young woman who has fled her sordid and abusive home life. Everybody's looking for something — redemption, revenge, a moment of grace — and their separate paths will eventually intersect in the town of Ackerman's Field, where these four disparate storylines will be inextricably drawn together.
Another powerfully unsettling novel by the master of the southern gothic, The Lost Country confirms William Gay’s reputation as one of the most talented and prolific contemporary authors — in the south and beyond.
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Praise for Little Sister Death and William Gay
"A mixture of Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King...as if Faulkner had written The Shining." --Kirkus Reviews
"The late William Gay is pure Tennessee Gothic. He is what Cormac McCarthy would have become if he had stayed in Tennessee writing about murder, incest, necrophilia and backwoods love. It's hard to find writing this dark that feels this authentic." --James Franco
"William Gay's Little Sister Death is a dark, shimmering gift to readers. Marshaling all his monumental narrative powers and with prose as sharp and glittering as a scythe, he brings a tale so sinister, lush and spellbinding, it haunts your dreams long after you reach its final pages." --Megan Abbott, author of The Fever and Dare Me
"A writer of remarkable talent and promise...eminently worth talking about." -The New York Times Book Review
"Earthily idiosyncratic, spookily Gothic...an author with a powerful vision." -The New York Times
"Southern writing at its very finest, soaked through with the words and images of rural Tennessee, packed full of that which really matters, the problems of the human heart." -Booklist
"A writer of striking talent." -Chicago Tribune
"Writers like Flannery O'Connor or William Faulkner would welcome Gay as their peer for getting characters so entangled in the roots of a family tree." -Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
"An old-fashioned barrel-aged shot of Tennessee storytelling. Gay's tale of ancient wrongs and men with guns is high-proof stuff." -Elwood Reid
"William Gay is the big new name to include in the stories annals of Southern lit." -Esquire
"A plot so gripping that the reader wants to fly through the pages to reach the conclusion...but the beauty and richness of Gay's language exerts a contrary pull, making the reader want to linger over every word." -Rocky Mountain News "Gay is a terrific writer." -The Plain Dealer
"William Gay is richly gifted: a seemingly effortless storyteller...a writer of prose that's fiercely wrought, pungent in detail yet poetic in the most welcome sense." -The New York Times Book Review
"A writer of striking talent." -Chicago Tribune
"Gay confirms his place in the Southern fiction pantheon." -Publishers Weekly
"Supple and beautifully told tales...saturated with an intense sense of place, their vividness and authenticity are impossible to fake." -The San Diego Union-Tribune
"Gay's characters come right up and bite you....[His] well-chosen words propel the reader straight through his 13 stories." -The Denver Post
"Even Faulkner would have been proud to call these words his own." -The Atlanta Journal Constitution
"Gay captivates with bristling tales of old men, bootleggers, and wife-beaters in rural Tennessee...his prose is as natural and pure as it comes." -Newsweek
"Think No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy, and Deliverance, by James Dickey. . . then double the impact." -Stephen King on naming Twilight the best book of 2007 in Entertainment Weekly "There is much to admire here: breathtaking, evocative writing and a dark, sardonic humor." - USA Today
"William Gay brings the daring of Flannery O'Connor and William Gaddis to his lush and violent surrealist yarns." -The Irish Times
"This is Southern Gothic of the very darkest hue, dripping with atmosphere, sparkling with loquacity, and with occasional gleams of horrible humor. To be read in the broadest daylight." -The Times
Praise for Little Sister Death
"A mixture of Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King...as if Faulkner had written The Shining." --Kirkus Reviews
Ten years after it was acquired, and long thought lost, the novel which the late William Gay often talked about before his death finally emerges.
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