This image is the cover for the book Airships

Airships

Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award, Airships is a “strong, original, tragic and funny” story collection of “the creative Southern tradition” (Alfred Kazin).

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.

Hailed by none other than Larry McMurtry as “the best young writer to appear in the South since Flannery O’Connor,” Barry Hannah’s immense storytelling gifts are on striking display in this essential work.

“Hannah takes fiction by surprise—scenes, shocks, sounds and amazements: an explosive but meticulous originality.” —Cynthia Ozick

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