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Marathon Reading of Barry Hannah’s Long, Last Happy is Now Completed
Thank you for joiningus for the exclusive HTMLGIANT webcast of the Marathon Reading of Barry Hannah’s posthumous Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories. If you were a winner of one of the giveaways from Grove/Atlantic or Square Books, please email your home address to kyle (at) kyleminor.com, to claim your prize.
More information about Barry Hannah at: Wikipedia, Vanity Fair, Boston Phoenix, New York Times, and Mississippi Writers Page.
Order a copy of Long, Last, Happy at: Square Books of Oxford, Mississippi (Barry’s hometown bookstore), Powell’s, Amazon, B&N, or Grove/Atlantic.
Today’s readers were Kyle Minor, author of the short fiction collection In the Devil’s Territory, and Nick Bruno, a senior fiction writing undergraduate at the University of Toledo.
This reading is courtesy of Grove/Atlantic and the Estate of Barry Hannah. The webcast was not recorded or archived.
Tags: Barry Hannah, Kyle Minor, long last happy
Thank you Kyle & thank you to the other wonderful folks @ HTMLGIANT for putting this on. Sabers up!
Thank you Kyle & thank you to the other wonderful folks @ HTMLGIANT for putting this on. Sabers up!
What Hannah should I read first? Should I start on Airships or is would Long, Last Happy be a good starting point? I’ve been trying to find a good entry point for his work the last several months but haven’t been able to make up my mind.
What Hannah should I read first? Should I start on Airships or is would Long, Last Happy be a good starting point? I’ve been trying to find a good entry point for his work the last several months but haven’t been able to make up my mind.
Michael, email me your address, to kyle (at) kyleminor.com
I don’t want to open that can of worms, but I wonder how many books writers suppressed or didn’t write for the fear of the Lish treatment.
Send me your mailing address to kyle (at) kyleminor.com & I’ll get them to you
Kyle, this is tremendous. Not a story (well a STORY), but a coincidence: just shelved a first(?) edition (no dj) of Geronimo Rex donated by Dara Wier. First person to buy a book from FO’s stock (Walser & Co not included) in the same price range ($20) gets it free. We’ll list some titles on facebook tomorrow. RAY awaits. Ah, but the stories. Well, I remember being impressed that Andrew Leland, Oberlin freshman, had already AIRSHIPS. Do I need to pick a favorite story? “Green Gets It”?
For the record, that was Walser & Co. Flying Object might have its own favorite story. You tell us.
Thank you Kyle & thank you to the other wonderful folks @ HTMLGIANT for putting this on. Sabers up!
What Hannah should I read first? Should I start on Airships or would Long, Last Happy be a good starting point? I’ve been trying to find a good entry point for his work the last several months but haven’t been able to make up my mind.
Airships, then Ray.
you have a very nice room to read in. bright red and bloodlike.
In the past I would’ve said Airships, but so many of the stories are in Long, Last, Happy, maybe that’s the better place to start now. My favorite book is still Bats Out of Hell (it was Hannah’s, too), and although LLH has a bunch of those stories, it doesn’t have them all (that book is about two-thirds as long as LLH by its own self.) Novel-wise, Ray is the real must-read.
My favorite in Airships has long been “Love Too Long.” But the one that was most fun to read tonight was “Coming Close to Donna.”
(So far, that is. I’m really looking forward to reading the new stories and the ones from Bats Out of Hell.)
I love Come Close to Donna so much. I think it might have my favorite ending to a short story ever.
Nick’s doing a great job reading right now, too. The room we’re reading in is a book arts laboratory with working vintage presses. Nick recently did a letterpress edition of my story “The Truth and All Its Ugly” here, with woodcuts (!) 75 of ’em. Also, you can’t see it on your screen, but we have a projector that was running football games six feet tall until about two hours ago. We’ll probably read long enough that football will come back around again tomorrow. For now, I’m thinking about projecting David Lynch movies or Sarah Palin videos or something.
If you were here, I would’ve let you read it tonight on the webcast.
Oh hell, that would have been swell. I rarely remember stories so vividly but that is a story that I can practically see, in its entirety, in my mind.
We keep coming across lines that make us laugh. It is difficult to keep from laughing instead of reading.
The next two replies to this comment (you have to say which story you’ve liked best so far) will get limited edition goodies from Square Books in Oxford, MS (Hannah’s hometown bookstore.)
Too cool
hi back
send me goodies
Coming Close To Donna. Woo!
i like Maximum Ned…what is amazing about that 9 page story is that for years Hannah worked on it as a novel. Gordo Lish’s archives at the Lily Library contained hundreds of beer-stained pages of that abandoned book…and all Lish whittled out was that story….ditto with Ray…there are 300-400 pages of a Ray manuscript but after Lish did his edit, the book was a 25,000 word novella in the end….but a great 25,000 words nonetheless…
Coming Close To Donna. Woo woo!
Michael, email me your address, to kyle (at) kyleminor.com
I don’t want to open that can of worms, but I wonder how many books writers suppressed or didn’t write for the fear of the Lish treatment.
Send me your mailing address to kyle (at) kyleminor.com & I’ll get them to you
Yes, Bats. That story with the one-armed Civil War grunt. Was it the title story?
my memory at this hour…
Kyle must be hitting meditative bliss by now, and a lot of pages in that book left…
It’s amazing to me that people are still listening now, at 4:30 in the morning (if the online stats are to be trusted.) Who are you, insomniacs? Announce yourselves, so we feel better about having an audience of flesh-and-blood rather than, I don’t know, robots.
I notice that Grove/Atlantic didn’t anthologize “Upstairs, Mona Bayed for Dong”
I announce myself.
You are a good and longsuffering woman, Roxane.
I like this story Nick is reading right now, “Two Things, Dimly, Were Going at Each Other.”
I like the stories in Captain Maximus, but these Bats Out of Hell stories are where you really start to see him catch his stride again, I think.
I am grading tonight because I have a reading tomorrow.
I can tell Nick is getting tired from the way his reading cadence is changing. I’m feeling it, too. I’m hoping to get a second wind soon.
I know that Joyce Carol Oates pulled a story from Esquire after receiving his edits — forget the story but she published it elsewhere and it won an award.
Eventually I cringed at the edits. I pleaded. They called me the father of 80s minimalism.
Fair enough. But goddammit, some of your stories are sort of thin and boring.
I’m pretty sure she didn’t suppress or not write any books for fear of Lish.
“Water Liars” and “Testimony of Pilot” have been my favorites. Is that like saying I really like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come As You Are,” maybe? I don’t care.
Nice work, you two.
“Testimony of Pilot” — and I don’t care if that makes me the guy who wants to hear the hit single at the concert.
Nice work, you two.
Edwardsville night owls checking in–still with you and having a good time. Eventually I’ll have to turn it over to morning people as they awaken. This was a great idea!
We’re on pace, I think, to finish reading by noon or so, or maybe even earlier. That’s a long sooner than I’d thought. One reason, perhaps, is the way the voices of these stories so often runs to yammering. The sentences unfurl and unfurl, and once you catch the rhythm, you realize how brisk it’s meant, almost always. It will be difficult — and probably take a couple of days — to get this voice out of my head so I can get back to the voices in my own fiction-making. So be it. I’ve learned plenty today, and enjoyed even more.
grea job so far, Kyle!
Great job! Thanks for keeping his spirit alive!
I can’t believe you finished so quickly! Is HTMLgiant powered by weapons-grade plutonium?
Impressive feat
I can’t recommend The Tennis Handsome enough. Really good book.
Thanks to everyone who watched some of the reading.
I just bought three Hannah books, so kudos to this approach.
That’s best-case scenario. Thanks for telling me.
Letterpresses and Woodcuts?! Sounds wild. Those going up for sale anywhere?
Yes, there are around 30 left, of a run of 75: banditpress.blogspot.com
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