Barry Hannah is a literary craftsman of rare verve and flawless turns of phrase. Geronimo Rex, his first novel, was awarded the William Faulkner Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award.

Reared in gloomy Dream of Pines, Louisiana, where the pines have long since yielded to paper mills, Harry Monroe is ready to take on the world. Inspired by the great Geronimo's heroic rampage through the Old West, Harry pulls on knee boots and a scarf and voyages out into the swamp of adolescence in the South of the 1950s and '60s. Along the way he is attacked by an unruly peacock; discovers women, rock 'n' roll, and jazz; and stalks a pervert white supremacist who fancies himself the next Henry Miller. As Harry comes awkwardly into his own, Barry Hannah gives us a brilliant portrait of those times and that place -- plagued by violent reality but giddy, like Harry himself, with a sense of unlimited possibility.

Now considered a contemporary classic, Airships was honored by Esquire magazine with the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. The twenty stories in this collection are a fresh, exuberant celebration of the new American South -- a land of high school band contests, where good old boys from Vicksurg are reunited in Vietnam and petty nostalgia and the constant pain of disappointed love prevail. Airships is a striking demonstration of Barry Hannah's mature and original talent.

Love and torment, lunacy and desire, tenderness and war -- the stories in Bats Out of Hell provide a brilliant, dazzling odyssey into American life. Barry Hannah's reputation as a master of the short story, first established in 1978 with the publication of Airships, is magnified in this volatile, long-awaited collection of new stories. Astonishing in range and in the portrayal of the human heart, these fierce and radar-perfect stories give us individuals with whom hilarity and pain combine with true and startling clarity.

Nominated for the American Book Award, Ray is the bizarre, hilarious, and consistently adventurous story of a life on the edge. Dr. Ray--a womanizer, small-town drunk, vigilante, poet, adoring husband--is a man trying to make sense of life in the twentieth century. In flight from the death he dealt flying over Vietnam, Dr. Ray struggles with those bound to him by need, sickness, lunacy, by blood and by love.

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.