LONG, LAST, HAPPY: New and Selected Stories. By Barry Hannah. (Grove)

“Long, Last, Happy combines the best of the four story collections Barry Hannah published during his lifetime, four new stories from the final manuscripts he left behind, and one early-career story never published in volume form. 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, hellraising, and a deep devotion to the art of storytelling.”