Word: hannah
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...Hannah has been writing this dazed and dazzling fiction from the depths of Alabama for over a decade now. His first book, Geronimo Rex, won the Faulkner Prize and immediately set Hannah up as a hot Southern Writer. This was followed by Nightwatchmen and then by the prizewinning collection of short stories, Airships. During this time, Hannah published a record number of stories in Esquire, where the native Mississippian confused the hell out of a lot of people with stories like "Dragged Fighting From His Tomb," the story of a homosexual Confederate Soldier who butchers his way into Pennsylvania, only...
...Hannah's characters were always at the very end of a very frayed rope. But still, they were refusing to go down with any sort of literary decorum. They wanted to tug on your coat for a minute. They wanted to explain things, to explain how it was to be so much in love that it was "driving you into a sorry person." They were yahoos and warriors, gigglers and killers, they were pilots and brain-damaged tennis pros. If they were funny--and they usually were--they were also noble as the last minutes of desperation dragged...
Those whom the Gods have doomed to a life of literary criticism often look askance at Hannah and his black humor. They criticized him for his absurdity. They were convinced that the world in general, and literature in particular, was a fundamentally sane enterprise. Those who applaud Hannah, with nothing better to say, fell back on complimenting his irony. But irony is not what Hannah is up to. Irony is simply juxtapositioning opposites--a false stance adopted by too many poor writers. It is a higher form of advertising; one flashes on garbage and someone says, "Nice...
...Hannah isn't ironic because he doesn't look for dualities, but instead goes for the whole damn show. Hannah has some sort of compound eye with an ear to match, and the result is a manic cacophony of life in These United States. His characters comprise the fifth column perpetually looking for salvation in a parking...
...takes perhaps a familiarity with Hannah before one can appreciate not how much he has left out of this tiny Ray (a book of some 60 chapters in only 113 pages) but how much he manages to recreate. Doctor Ray alternates between the first and third persons, his thoughts follow each other in a seemingly random order, and yet he emerges with the clarity of night neon. He wants to resist becoming another victim of "the American confusion"--he wants the carbon monoxide and the cancers to go away--he wants the persiflage to magically transform itself into poetry...