Yonder Stands Your Orphan (Broadside) - Softcover

Barry Hannah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903809169 ISBN 13: 9781903809167

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2001

Synopsis

This is the first novel in ten years from Barry Hannah - 'the Jimi Hendrix of American short fiction' (Interview magazine).

Yonder Stands Your Orphan is an electrifying story about how the denizens of a lakeside community in Mississippi are beset by madness, murder and sin in the form of Man Mortimer.

Mortimer, a creature of the casinos who looks like the dead country singer Conway Twitty, is a killer who has turned mean and sick. He visits upon the town by Eagle Lake 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 gruesome crime spree. But who will die, who will burn?

Yonder Stands Your Orphan is a tour de force. It is an hysterical and unremittingly gothic account of obsession, violence, sex and religion in America's Deepest South.

About this title

About the Author

Barry Hannah, described by Truman Capote as 'the maddest writer in the USA', is the author of eleven novels. Ray was nominated for the American Book Award and his collection of short stories, Airships, is regarded as a contemporary classic. Geronimo Rex won the William Faulkner Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Mississippi.

From Publishers Weekly

Hallelujah! After a 10-year absence, Hannah (Airships; High Lonesome) is back with a vengeance with a Southern gothic novel full of every kind of excess: violence, sex, religiosity, creepiness and humor. Here we have Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Peter Dexter and Clyde Edgerton all squished together, baked in hush-puppy batter, dipped in honey and sprinkled with Jim Beam. Set in a lake community in the vicinity of Vicksburg, Miss., the story revolves around a fellow named Man Mortimer, a thief, pimp and murderer and those are his good qualities who physically resembles the late country singer Conway Twitty. On his trail are Byron Egan, a somewhat reformed biker-turned-preacher and prophet, and Max Raymond, a former doctor who plays saxophone in a bar band and has an attractive Cuban wife who sings, sometimes for the band, sometimes nude in her back yard. Meanwhile, the young town sheriff, distrusted since he hails from the North, manages to shock even the most degenerate denizens of the area with his affair with a luscious 72-year-old widow. The plot is kaleidoscopic, with flashes and slashes of wonder, humor and the macabre expertly mixed. Hannah tosses off linguistic gems on almost every page: "... sometimes he felt he was a whole torn country, afire in all quadrants." Describing a car, "It smelled like very lonely oil men." Reading today's fiction is too often like eating stale bread. With Hannah (finalist for the American Book Award and the National Book Award), just imagine your most mouthwatering meal, take a double helping and you've come close to the pleasure of reading this book. (July)Forecast: This is Hannah's first novel in 10 years, and arguably his finest. Grove is celebrating it with a 25,000-copy first printing, and retrospective reviews and features will ensure that readers sit up and take notice. Sales will be strongest in the South, but should be steady elsewhere, too. An evocative, Faulkneresque jacket will attract browsers.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1903809169
• ISBN 13: 9781903809167
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336