Airships by Barry Hannah Winner of the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award ISBN: 0-8021-3388-6 / ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-3388-5 US $14.00 - 5 3/8 X 8 1/4, 224 pp - Mar. 1994

Praise:
“[Airships] struck me—as a great upheaval of our literary expectations, a liberating force. . . . Hannah’s language is audacious, bracing and insistent, often at the ragged brink of control. Words flash in ways no one had thought of before. Not ever.” —Charles Frazier, Paste

“Barry Hannah is an original, and one of the most consistently exciting writers of the post-Faulkner generation. The stories in Airships are fiercely imagined fables in which hilarity and pain achieve a remarkable equipoise; sometimes funny, often terrifying, they are told in a captivating and unforgettable voice.” —William Styron, Salon

“Strong, original, tragic, and funny in the same voice—a writer of violent honesty and power in the creative Southern tradition.” —Alfred Kazin

“These stories are wonderful in the ways Mark Twain, Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor are wonderful when they are working the great vein of fierce and pitiless Southern comedy. The war stories in particular—joining, as they do for me, the clownish misery and colossal overkill of Vietnam to the American Civil War—are masterpieces of their kind. Hannah is more than just a new voice—he is half a dozen brilliant new voices.” —Philip Roth

“Talents as broad as this thrive in novels but rarely take to the more constricting form of the short story. Airships proves Barry Hannah an exception . . . artfully rounded-off vignettes jumping with humor and menace. . . . The stories bounce off and echo one another, giving the book an impact greater than the sum of its parts. . . . Most young Southern writers resent being compared to such past giants as Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. In embracing the gothic mode, Hannah has planted himself firmly on their turf. On the evidence of this book, their shadows are not stunting his growth.” —Time

“Exhilarating! Hannah is afraid of nothing in experience. He runs to meet life and to transform it.” —Denis Donoghue

“Hannah’s stories are powerful, and powerfully original.” —John Gardner
 
“One reads Barry Hannah and is amazed! Airships places him in the very first rank of American literary artists, and leaves us breathless with the force of its feeling.” —James Dickey

 “[Airships and Garp] deserve all the praise they can get . . . even the overpraise . . . because we are so thirsty for good fiction, for the art of storytelling, because we so much want the pleasure of encountering true (and therefore original) invention, vision, and voice, that only superlatives can express our gratitude. . . . Hannah has more force, in fact, explosive force. He has kicked free of the visible thematic scaffolding through which Irving’s people have to climb. . . . More writers have been smuggled out of the South than cartons of cigarettes, and Barry Hannah is one of the best. . . . He now gives us a collection of stories that has already amazed James Dickey, exhilarated Denis Donoghue, and lured the word ‘masterpieces’ from Philip Roth. And rightly so. . . . He can, as he says of a saxophone, ‘get up into inhumanly careless beauty . . . get among mutinous helium bursts around Saturn.’ Reading Airships is like having lightning shark down at you in the dark. It illuminates where you are. It can scare you half to death. Wtihin all the raucous, lyric, sly, spooked, and innocent voices of his people, Hannah’s voice is unmistakable. . . . Almost always, his writing is pure and easy because perfectly self-confident. . . . Lost in a New South that is everywhere and nowhere anymore, Hannah is always reaching, with the communal hunger of his heritage, back into the past (the Civil War), out into the future (apocalyptic Gotterdammerungs), and up to the universe. . . . Hannah, in the Twain tradition, is what he calls ‘a great liar,’ a teller of ‘big loose ones.’ It is this oratory of hyperbolic Southern voices telling their largely luckless tales that reminds reviewers of O’Connor and Welty, but Hannah is more secular and less furious than O’Connor, and he’s more romantic and less forgiving than Welty, though he does have the latter’s sweetness of heart, her delight in the vitality of survivors, her faith in love. . . . Like Faulkner, Hannah is compelled by the past . . . but it is a painful, uneasy compulsion. . . . Also like Faulkner, Hannah is moved by macho romanticism, though he fights the impulse to pant after Faulknerian courage and pride and honor and sacrifice and etc., in their Colonel Sartoris manifestations. . . . Quite specifically, Hannah ties our Civil War to the one in Southeast Asia [Vietnam], and so the Old South to the New, for in both those sorry messes Southern Americans, black and white, found ‘all we had going was the pursuit of horror.’ . . . Hannah is, finally, neither a nihilist nor a confirmed cynic. Finally, he’s a lover and even a patriot.” —Michael Malone, The Nation