Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories

Recognized with a PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in short fiction, Barry Hannah was a master of the American short story. He was also one of the most important writers of the South's post-Faulkner generation, introducing 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, bebop, and the Bible. He has paved the way for a new generation of young writers, and his death in March 2010 remains an irrevocable loss to American letters.

Now, combining the best of the four story cllections he published during his lifetime, four new stories from the final manuscripts he left behind, and one early-career story never published in volume form, Long, Last, Happy is a feast for readers new and old. Here, a man's estranged wife buzzes his house in her airplane, and a tailgate party can turn suddenly Biblical. The Confederate corporal in love with his general, the retired surgeon turning canine, the teenage boy rebelling against the "gloomy John Birch literature" of his surroundings, who ends up looking after an eccentric, beautiful lush---Hannah's characters occupy the intersection of heartbreak and surreal comedy. In his last works, set in a Mississippi college town terrorized by mysterious arson, the ghosts of history and devilments of love, lust, and drink walk the streets. Throughout, his ferocious, glittering prose maps a literary New South---a fictional landscape burning with racial unease, sex, love, hell-raising, and a deep devotion to the art of storytelling

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has called Hannah a "mendacity-battling Colossus." Long, Last, Happy serves as the definitive collection of Hannah's finest short fiction and confirms that he was one our most brilliant voices until the very end.

Barry Hannah (1942-2010) was the author of eight novels and four story collections. His work was published in The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper's among many other publications, and honored with an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction.