Airships

“Wonderful in the ways [of] Mark Twain, Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.”—Philip Roth

WINNER OF THE PEN/MALAMUD AWARD • WINNER OF THE ARNOLD GINGRICH SHORT FICTION AWARD

From “one of the most exciting voices of the post-Faulkner generation” (William Styron), Barry Hannah’s triumphant classic Airships is a freewheeling and energetic collection of stories about love, loss, and legacy in the American South

Lauded as one of the most important writers of the South’s post-Faulkner generation, Barry Hannah was a master of the American short story. He introduced readers to 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, bepop, and the Bible. Hailed by none other than Larry McMurtry as “the best young writer to appear in the South since Flannery O’Connor,” Barry Hannah’s Airships is a virtuosic ode to the art of storytelling.

One of the most revered short story collections of the past fifty years, Airships remains a vital text in the history of the American short story. The award-winning contemporary classic features twenty wildly original, exuberant, often hilarious stories that celebrate the universal peculiarities of the new American South—a land of high school band contests where good old boys from Vicksburg are reunited in Vietnam, and petty nostalgia and the incessant pain of disappointed love prevail in spite of our worst efforts. Burning with racial unease, sex, love, and hell-raising, Airships is a testament to Hannah’s status as a “mendacity-battling Colossus” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) and one our most brilliant writers to date.

“[Airships] struck me—as a great upheaval of our literary expectations, a liberating force . . . Hannah’s language is audacious, bracing and insistent, often at the ragged brink of control. Words flash in ways no one had thought of before. Not ever.”—Charles Frazier, Paste