Stories from the Attic

Stories from the Attic

From a celebrated master of the Southern Gothic comes a last collection of hard-hitting short fiction, his final posthumous work Beloved for his novels  Twilight, The Long Home, and  The Lost Country  ,and his groundbreaking collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down , William Gay returns with one final posthumous collection of short stories, adapted from the archive found after his death in February 2012. In addition to previously unpublished short stories, Stories from the Attic  includes fragments from two of the unpublished novels that were works in progress at the time of his death. Marked by his signature skill and bare-knuckled insight, this collection is a must-read for William Gay devotees and fans of Southern short fiction. Praise for William Gay "Gay’s great abilities in character building, richness of language and storytelling are on full display.” -Charles Frazier, author of Varina “William Gay is richly gifted: a seemingly effortless storyteller…a writer of prose that’s fiercely wrought, pungent in detail yet poetic in the most welcome sense.” - The New York Times Book Review "Gay’s style was fully formed: sinister and lovely, dark and atmospheric, blood-soaked and word-drunk. He fit squarely in the Southern Gothic tradition, but the languid, unrolling richness of his language made the stories and novels that followed feel fresh, a rebirth of a genre prone to pale imitations." - Wall Street Journal "The pleasure that Gay, a self-educated Vietnam veteran, takes from language is frequently a thing of beauty...A Dickensian feel for character makes his stories surge with life while the sharp dialogue is furious, funny and very southern. ....Gay, an instinctive original, had the spark of natural genius." - The Irish Times "William Gay could write a grocery list and make it sing and burn off the pages in equal measure." - Heavy Feather Review "William Gay is a flat-out monster." -Parnassus Recommended Reads “Writers like Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner would welcome Gay as their peer for getting characters so entangled in the roots of a family tree.” — Star Tribune  (Minneapolis) “A writer of striking talent.” — Chicago Tribune Born in Tennessee in 1939, William Gay began writing at fifteen and wrote his first novel at twenty-five, but didn’t begin publishing until well into his fifties. He worked as a TV salesman, in local factories, did construction, hung sheetrock, and painted houses to support himself. He preferred to sit in a kitchen chair at the edge of the woods with a spiral-bound notebook on his knee, writing in his peculiar scrawling longhand. His works include The Long Home, Provinces of Night, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, Wittgenstein’s Lolita, and Twilight . His work has been adapted for the screen twice, That Evening Sun (2009) and Bloodworth (2010). Most recently, his debut novel has been optioned for film. He died in 2012.