This image is the cover for the book Long, Last, Happy

Long, Last, Happy

A definitive, career-spanning, best-of tribute to a master of the modern American short story, featuring work from his final unpublished collection.

A fitting summation of one of America’s greatest short story masters, this towering tribute features stories from Airships, Captain Maximus, Bats Out of Hell, High Lonesome, and Barry Hannah’s final unfinished collection, Long, Last, Happy. The astonishingly varied stories in this collection span nearly five decades of unremitting brilliance. Praised for writing “the most consistently interesting sentences of any writer in America” (Sven Birkerts), Hannah’s ferocious, glittering prose and sui generis worldview introduced readers to a literary New South—a fictional landscape that encompasses “women, God, lust, race, nature, gay Confederates, good old boys, bad old boys, guns, animals, fishing, fighting, cars, pestilence, surrealism, gritty realism, the future, and the past . . . tossed together in glorious juxtapositions” (Vanity Fair). Long, Last, Happy confirms Barry Hannah as one of our most brilliant voices.

“Hannah is the Jimi Hendrix of American short fiction; an electrifying Mark Twain—a wailing genius of literary twang, reverb, feedback, and general sonic unholiness that results in grace notes so piercing you heart melts like an overloaded amp.” —Interview

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.

Atlantic Monthly Press