Airships

I can always tell a great book by the fact I'm constantly thinking of bits I'd like to steal while reading. By that criteria, reading Airships was like being tossed in a jewlery store at night without any security around. Airships is a collection of stories about war, sex, airplanes and horses. The usual, but done with incredible style and energy. I find that far too much modern short fiction is so polished and calculated it comes out as a dulled diamond (or more often polished stone), but Hannah's work is full of the rough, gritty, loose writing that draws you in like possessed jungle vines and then you get attacked by a Panther or something. A few of the stories fall short and at least one didn't work at all for me, but I'll still give it a big ol' A+

A wonderful collection of stories that made me laugh outloud more than anything since the first time I read Celine. From one story to the next I was trully captivated. What sets him apart from other writers is his T.S. Eliot - like gift to come up with phrases that ring in your head like coins for years to come. No writer ever has been able to sum up a character in a single sentence like Hannah. Her husband was an intellectual in real estate... etc. The same is true in other volumes. Latouche (with metaphysical approaches named after him), is a good example.I am not yet published but have written nine novels and hope my day will come soon. Hannah along with Richard Ford, Cormack McCarthy, Flaubert, Rilke, Celine, and Peter Handke, are my all-time favorites. Thanks for the inspiration!

This is one of the greatest short story collections/cycles in the history of the form. To hell with political correctness. When the smoke of overeducated ignorance clears from the last half of this century, Airships will be canonical.

Barry Hannah is a great Southern writer, to be sure, but he's also just a flat out great writer. This collection is intense, hillarious, joyful, heartbreaking and sometimes very, very weird. It is magnificent. Don't stop with this one, though. Read RAY. Read GERONIMO REX. Read BATS OUT OF HELL. Hell, read everything you can get your grubby little hands on. I've never gone away from a Barry Hanna book disappointed or unchanged.

A hilarious, trenchant, and effervescently surreal examination of a range of situations and (mainly Southern) characters. The writer covers artists, cannibals, Civil War soldiers, and yes, even some racists and misogynists. All are brilliantly imagined and colored with Hannah's almost insane inventiveness and wit. An excellent, challenging set of stories that stretches the confines of great writing. Not for grannies or traditionalists.