Love and torment, lunacy and desire, tenderness and war the stories in "Bats Out of Hell "provide a brilliant, dazzling odyssey into American life. Barry Hannah's reputation as a master of the short story, first established in 1978 with the publication of Airships, is magnified in this volatile, long-awaited collection of new stories. Astonishing in range and in the portrayal of the human heart, these fierce and radar-perfect stories give us individuals with whom hilarity and pain combine with true and startling clarity."

Nominated for the American Book Award, Ray is the bizarre, hilarious, and consistently adventurous story of a life on the edge. Dr. Ray--a womanizer, small-town drunk, vigilante, poet, adoring husband--is a man trying to make sense of life in the twentieth century. In flight from the death he dealt flying over Vietnam, Dr. Ray struggles with those bound to him by need, sickness, lunacy, by blood and by love.

Now considered a contemporary classic, Airships was honored by Esquire magazine with the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. The twenty stories in this collection are a fresh, exuberant celebration of the new American South a land of high school band contests, where good old boys from Vicksurg are reunited in Vietnam and petty nostalgia and the constant pain of disappointed love prevail. Airships is a striking demonstration of Barry Hannah's mature and original talent."

In Boomerang, a novel told in vignettes both real and fictive, a father attempting to cope with the tragic murder of his son learns that actions return to haunt or reward. He becomes the embodiment of Hannah's ideal of forbearance, dignity, and decency in the face of incomprehensible death. In Never Die Hannah mingles hilarity and horror as the frontier West is killed off by the onset of automobiles, biplanes, and nitroglycerine bombs. A gallery of grotesque characters - a judges' evil dwarf henchman, a nymphomaniacal schoolteacher, and a homosexual doctor named Fingo - populate this...

" Long, Last, Happy" combines the best of the four story collections Barry Hannah published during his lifetime, four new stories from the final manuscripts he left behind, and one early-career story never published in volume form. Here, a man s estranged wife buzzes his house in her airplane, and a tailgate party can turn suddenly Biblical. The Confederate corporal in love with his General, the retired surgeon turning canine, the teenage boy rebelling against the gloomy John Birch literature of his surroundings, who ends up looking after an eccentric, beautiful lushHannah s characters occupy...