Word: hannah
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Whenever they start talking about Barry Hannah in the periodicals, they always bring up the Southern Writer thing. Southern Writers. The phrase rolls blissfully off the tongue as if it actually mertied those majuscules. It rolls off the tongue like a fait accompli, like some sort of advertising slogan. Southern Writers. Northern Lights. Westward...
...seems, is Barry Hannah. There are few writers today who can match Hannah for sheer sustain--for the ability to keep extraordinary excess under control. He resists the usual literary tricks, the epiphanies and the neat endings, the sly references and displays of prodigious learning. Instead he revels in our perversity. He points to the airports, the pimps and the pinups and remains dazzled, amazed, repulsed and fascinated. He distills it all and produces the literary equivalent of grain Alcohol--a genuine Purple Jesus...
...Barry Hannah...
Author Barry Hannah, 38, is also a connoisseur of the rundown, the tacky, the disreputable. Observes one wastrel: "My pappy's from Mississippi. He ain't worth nothing, but there he is." Pretty much the same thing can be said about Ray himself. Hannah is talented enough to make his hero's uninhibited meanness sympathetic and humorous. Ray says things that most people only think, at low moments: "I get tired of people. All of them driving around in their cars, eating, having to be." But unrelieved rascality can grow boring, and this short novel ends...
From Georgia O'Keeffe's closeup flowers in the '20s, through Louise Bourgeois's sculpture in the '50s, or Hannah Wilke's latex wall hangings in the '70s, there is by now a considerable array...