This image is the cover for the book High Lonesome

High Lonesome

A darkly comic, fiercely tragic, and strikingly original odyssey into contemporary American life by “the Jimi Hendrix of American short fiction” (Interview).

The thirteen masterful tales in this collection by the award-winning author of Airships and Bats Out of Hell explore lost moments in time with intensity, emotion, and an eye to the past. In “Uncle High Lonesome,” a young man recalls an uncle’s drinking binges and the rage unleashed, hinting at dark waters of distress. Fishing is transformed into a life-altering, almost mystical event in “A Creature in the Bay of St. Louis.” And in “Snerd and Niggero,” a deep friendship between two men is inspired by the loss of a woman they both loved. Viewed through memory and time’s distance, Barry Hannah’s characters are brightly illuminated figures from a lost time, whose occasionally bleak lives are still uncommonly true.

“Barry Hannah’s writing is raw and exhilarating, tortured, radiant, vicious, aggressive, funny, and streaked with rage, pain and bright poetic truth.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer on Airships

Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah (1942–2010) was the author of twelve books: Geronimo Rex, Airships, Ray, The Tennis Handsome, Nightwatchmen, Captain Maximus, Hey Jack, Boomerang, Never Die, Bats Out of Hell, High Lonesome and Yonder Stands Your Orphan. His work was published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, The Southern Review, The Oxford American, Gulf Coast Review, and many other magazines. His achievements in fiction have been honored with an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and he was nominated for the American Book Award for Ray and the National Book Award for Geronimo Rex, which won the William Faulkner Prize. He has also received the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award for Airships, and his body of work has been recognized with the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction. Hannah was director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford for three decades, and also taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Sewanee and Bennington summer writing seminars, and held teaching appointments at many other colleges and universities.

Grove Press