Short Story Collections

William Gay established himself as "the big new name to include in the storied annals of Southern Lit" ( Esquire ) with his debut novel, The Long Home , and his highly acclaimed follow-up, Provinces of Night . Like Faulkner's Mississippi and Cormac McCarthy's American West, Gay's Tennessee is redolent of broken souls. Mining that same fertile soil, his debut collection, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down , brings together thirteen stories charting the pathos of interior lives. Among the colorful people readers meet are: old man Meecham, who escapes from his nursing home only to find his son has rented their homestead to "white trash"; Quincy Nell Qualls, who not only falls in love with the town lothario but, pregnant, faces an inescapable end when he abandons her; Finis and Doneita Beasley, whose forty-year marriage is broken up by a dead dog; and Bobby Pettijohn -- awakened in the night by a search party after a body is discovered in his back woods. William Gay expertly sets these conflicted characters against lush backcountry scenery and defies our moral logic as we grow to love them for the weight of their human errors.

Gay maps out a landscape of love and death, exploring the terrain where a person's love of life interacts with their fear of the dark unknown. He portrays a character looking for love that reaches beyond death--with occasional morbid consequences.

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 In addition to previously unpublished short stories, Stories from the Attic includes fragments from two of the unpublished novels that were works in progress at the time of his death.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.