{"title":"William Gay","description":"William Gay was the author of the novels The Long Home and Provinces of Night. His fiction appeared in Harper's and Atlantic Monthly, among others, and he won the William Peden Award and the James Michener Memorial Prize. He passed away in 2012.","products":[{"product_id":"provinces-of-night-paperback","title":"Provinces of Night - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eIt's 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman's Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he's been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won't be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he's an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.'s grandson, is pleased with the old man's homecoming, but Fleming's life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. \u003cb\u003eProvinces of Night\u003c\/b\u003e is a tale redolent of violence and redemption-a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis. \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003ch3\u003eFront Jacket\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt's 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman's Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he's been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won't be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he's an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.'s grandson, is pleased with the old man's homecoming, but Fleming's life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre. \u003cbr\u003eIn the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption-a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51369815343327,"sku":"9780385499286","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/hmzeYYK6PA9780385499286.webp?v=1789146677"},{"product_id":"i-hate-to-see-that-evening-sun-go-down-collected-stories-paperback","title":"I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down: Collected Stories - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eWilliam 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51370077913311,"sku":"9780743242929","price":21.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/5FY1bO-1tB9780743242929.webp?v=1789150312"},{"product_id":"wittgensteins-lolita-paperback","title":"Wittgenstein's Lolita - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eGay 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51370180935903,"sku":"9780976520221","price":11.52,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/axdE66L5HH9780976520221.webp?v=1789153591"},{"product_id":"stoneburner-hardcover","title":"Stoneburner - Hardcover","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStoneburner is a hardboiled detective story written as only William Gay could do it. The story is set in the mid 1970s and includes a jaded private eye named Stoneburner, a redneck Vietnam vet named Thibodeaux, a beautiful young blonde named Cathy Meecham and an ex-Sheriff named Cap Holder loosely based on Buford Pusser. Stoneburner is the private eye who has abandoned his office in Memphis to live on the banks of the Tennessee River where he is building a cabin. The story follows him as he meets a local retired sheriff who made a fortune when Hollywood produced a movie based on his exploits cleaning up the drug dealers in his rural county. However, now the Sheriff, Cap Holder, has run through the money on ill conceived business plans, fancy cars, big boats and expensive young girlfriends. He comes to Stoneburner when his plans to recoup his losses on a coke deal goes wrong and the young girlfriend turns up missing, both at the same time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCap wants Stoneburner to find both the money and the girl. The redneck named Thibodeaux just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time and was able to make off with a briefcase full of drug money and the young blonde. Thibodeaux and the girl are on the run, moving across Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas, leaving a trail a mile wide with Stoneburner not far behind. Thibodeaux and the girl buy a Cadillac purportedly owned by Elvis which eventually ends up in the top of a tree in the Ozarks. Stoneburner quickly figures out that he is not the only person that wants to find Thibodeaux. The drug lord, a local Nashville music producer, who was supplying the cocaine is on the trail as well.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book follows two tracks, starting with Thibodeaux who is living in rural Tennessee and getting by as best he can. He is a town drunk constantly in trouble with the law, leaving behind a string of wrecked cars and trucks. However, his luck changes one night when he figures out someone is using an abandoned airstrip to fly in drugs and cases it out until one night a plane lands and he is able to make off with a briefcase full of cash. Once he has the money he is able to pick up the blonde, who was double-crossing both Cap Holder and the drug dealers, and away they go.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51370215833823,"sku":"9780998980904","price":33.75,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/YNBb28mQkJ9780998980904.webp?v=1789153659"},{"product_id":"twilight-paperback-1","title":"Twilight - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eSuspecting that something is amiss with their father's burial, teenager Kenneth Tyler and his sister Corrie venture to his gravesite and make a horrific discovery: their father, a whiskey bootlegger, was not actually buried in the casket they bought for him. Worse, they learn that the undertaker, Fenton Breece, has been grotesquely manipulating the dead. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eArmed with incriminating photographs, Tyler becomes obsessed with bringing the perverse undertaker to justice. But first he must outrun Granville Sutter, a local strongman and convicted murderer hired by Fenton to destroy the evidence. What follows is an adventure through the Harrikin, an eerie backwoods filled with tangled roads, rusted machinery, and eccentric squatters--old men, witches, and families among them--who both shield and imperil Tyler as he runs for safety. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWith his poetic, haunting prose, William Gay rewrites the rules of the gothic fairytale while exploring the classic Southern themes of good and evil.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51373909704927,"sku":"9781938103230","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/ijHeDdUFUR9781938103230.webp?v=1789164585"},{"product_id":"fugitives-of-the-heart-hardcover","title":"Fugitives of the Heart - Hardcover","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this, William Gay's last posthumous novel, we have his homage to Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Set in post-World War II Tennessee, in Gay's familiar \"Harrikan\" area. Marion Yates is a teenager recently orphaned when his notoriously licentious mother dies. When Yates eyes a pocketknife at the local grocery-hardware store, he is befriended by Black Crowe, who buys the knife for him. Yates in turn nurses Crowe through a work explosion, and the two form a seemingly lasting friendship. Yates falls in love, of course, and of course the love is thwarted. First love, racism, and betrayal-these are all topped with Gay's signature wry humor in his signature Tennessee fictional setting. Gay again proves himself a master of prose.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51374118863071,"sku":"9781604892734","price":39.08,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/yaB5VcPEX9781604892734.webp?v=1789171958"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/william-gay.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}