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career-spanning, best-of tribute to a master of the modern American short story, featuring work from his final unpublished collection.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

Called the best fiction writer to appear in the South since Flannery O'Connor (Larry McMurtry), acclaimed author Hannah ("Airships, Bats Out of Hell") returns with an all-new collection of short stories.

Now an original movie on Prime Video starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine! When Solène Marchand, the thirty-nine-year-old owner of a prestigious art gallery in Los Angeles, takes her daughter, Isabelle, to meet her favorite boy band, she does so reluctantly and at her ex-husband’s request. The last thing she expects is to make a connection with one of the members of the world-famous August Moon. But Hayes Campbell is clever, winning, confident, and posh, and the attraction is immediate. That he is all of twenty years old further complicates things. What begins as a series of clandestine trysts quickly evolves into a passionate relationship. It is a journey that spans continents as Solène and Hayes navigate each other’s disparate worlds: from stadium tours to international art fairs to secluded hideaways in Paris and Miami. And for Solène, it is as much a reclaiming of self, as it is a rediscovery of happiness and love. When their romance becomes a viral sensation, and both she and her daughter become the target of rabid fans and an insatiable media, Solène must face how her new status has impacted not only her life, but the lives of those closest to her.

While there are many self-help books addressing marriage issues, none is as pointed and straightforward as O'Neill's A Short Guide to a Happy Marriage. Like her highly acclaimed short book, Sheltering Thoughts: About Loss and Grief, this book will speak to its readers through its directness and simplicity. It challenges readers to understand and live by the tenets of a committed relationship. In the spirit of the bestselling book, A Short Guide To A Happy Life by Anna Quindlen, author Sharon Gilchrest O’Neill offers readers the same inviting and simple but sensible approach for embracing marriage, and provides the essentials of a long lasting relationship.

If he had been with me everything would have been different... I wasn't with Finn on that August night. But I should've been. It was raining, of course. And he and Sylvie were arguing as he drove down the slick road. No one ever says what they were arguing about. Other people think it's not important. They do not know there is another story. The story that lurks between the facts. What they do not know—the cause of the argument—is crucial. So let me tell you...

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

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

A historically accurate study that takes no sides, this book is the first complete document of Treaties 8 and 11 between the Canadian government and the Native people at the turn of the nineteenth century.