Rich in color and humor, this great novel follows the adventures of Huckleberry Finn and vividly recreates the world, the people, and the language that Mark Twain knew and loved from his own years on the frontier of the Mississippi. He has no mother, his father is a brutal drunkard, and he sleeps in a hogshead. He's Huck Finn, a homeless waif, a liar and thief on occasion, and a casual rebel against respectability. But on the day he encounters another fugitive from trouble, a runaway slave named Jim, he also finds--for the first time in his life--love, acceptance, and a sense of...
Rich in color and humor, this great novel follows the adventures of Huckleberry Finn and vividly recreates the world, the people, and the language ...
"If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel (and maybe they did. Did they?) it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell's."--Richard Ford The Interrogative Mood is a wildly inventive, jazzy meditation on life and language by the novelist that Ian Frazier hails as "one of the best writers in America, and one of the funniest, too." A novel composed entirely of questions, it is perhaps the most audacious literary high-wire act since Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine or David Foster Wallace's stories;a playful and profound book...
"If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel (and maybe they did. Did they?) it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell...
Padgett Powell, author of the acclaimed The Interrogative Mood and "one of the few truly important American writers of our time" (Sam Lipsyte), returns with a hilarious Southern send-up of Samuel Beckett's classic Waiting for Godot.
Truly a master of envelope-pushing, post-postmodern American fiction, in a class with Nicholas Baker and Lydia Davis, Powell brilliantly blends the sublime, the trivial, and the oddball in You & Me, as two loquacious gents on a porch discuss all manner of subjects, from the mundane to the spiritual to the downright...
Padgett Powell, author of the acclaimed The Interrogative Mood and "one of the few truly important American writers of our time" (Sam Lips...
The idiosyncratic genius of Padgett Powell shines through in nine stories that bend the conventions of short fiction Padgett Powell's literary stage is a blurred vision of the American South. His characters are bored, sad, assured, confused, deluded, and often just one step away from madness. The stories they populate are madder still, delivered by a voice enthralling and distinctive. Whether he's chronicling a housewife's encouragement of adolescent lust, following two good ol' boys on their search for a Chinese healer, or delving into the mind of an unstable moped accident...
The idiosyncratic genius of Padgett Powell shines through in nine stories that bend the conventions of short fiction Padgett Powell's liter...
In the sequel to Powell's acclaimed debut, Edisto, Simons Manigault is older-if not particularly wiser-and searching for the cure to his restlessness in memory, travel, and forbidden love Fourteen years after we first met Simons Manigault, our protagonist is newly graduated from Clemson University, bored, unfocused, and idling his summer away at his mother's home in Edisto, South Carolina. Not yet ready to fully embrace adulthood, Simons finds himself surrendering to cynicism, as well as to the temptations of his "turned-out-well" first cousin, Patricia. To avoid sinking further into his rut,...
In the sequel to Powell's acclaimed debut, Edisto, Simons Manigault is older-if not particularly wiser-and searching for the cure to his restlessness ...
Twenty-three surreal fictions-stories, character assassinations, and mini-travelogues-from one of the most heralded writers of the American South There are many things that repulse "Dr. Ordinary." "Kansas" is notable for its distinct lack of farmland. "Wayne's Fate" is most unfortunate, not merely for Wayne but for the roofer pal who stands by watching his good buddy lose his head. "Miss Resignation" simply cannot win at Bingo. And there is nothing "Typical" about the unemployed steelworker and self-described "piece of crud" who strides through this collection's title story. Welcome to the...
Twenty-three surreal fictions-stories, character assassinations, and mini-travelogues-from one of the most heralded writers of the American South Ther...
Hailed by Time as an "extravagantly comic" novel, A Woman Named Drown is a wild and strange journey through America's South that follows a young PhD dropout who falls in with an amateur actress-cum-pool shark On the brink of earning his doctorate in chemistry, the unnamed narrator decides to chuck it all away in favor of real life. So begins an odd pilgrimage through the American South. In Tennessee, our hero is bewitched by an older, gin-swilling, pool-playing sometimes-actress who claims to have recently starred in a theatrical production about a "woman named Drown."...
Hailed by Time as an "extravagantly comic" novel, A Woman Named Drown is a wild and strange journey through America's South that foll...
A housewife revels in the secret world of her mind filled with historical characters and twisted love stories in this inventive sendup of Southern fiction.
Mrs. Hollingsworth sits at her kitchen table, compiling her grocery list. The subject of the list is not foodstuffs, but memories that never happened, inventions of loves, and strange conspiracies peopled by men who appear in the lonely housewife's head--men infinitely more real to her than her own husband.
Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest gallops into her story, courtesy of media giant Ted Turner...
A housewife revels in the secret world of her mind filled with historical characters and twisted love stories in this inventive sendup of Southern ...