Synopses & Reviews
Through memorable language and bawdy humor, Gurganus returns to his mythological Falls, North Carolina, home of
Widow. This first work in a decade offers three novellas mirroring today’s face-lifted South, a zone revolutionized around freer sexuality, looser family ties, and superior telecommunications, yet it celebrates those locals who have chosen to stay local. In doing so,
Local Souls uncovers certain old habits—adultery, incest, obsession—still very much alive in our New South, a "Winesburg, Ohio" with high-speed Internet.
Wells Tower says of Gurganus, "No living writer knows more about how humans matter to each other." Such ties of love produce hilarious, if wrenching, complications: "Fear Not" gives us a banker's daughter seeking the child she was forced to surrender when barely fifteen, only to find an adult rescuer she might have invented. In "Saints Have Mothers," a beloved high school valedictorian disappears during a trip to Africa, granting her ambitious mother a postponed fame that turns against her. And in a dramatic "Decoy," the doctor-patient friendship between two married men breaks toward desire just as a biblical flood shatters their neighborhood and rearranges their fates.
Gurganus finds fresh pathos in ancient tensions: between marriage and Eros, parenthood and personal fulfillment. He writes about erotic hunger and social embarrassment with Twain's knife-edged glee. By loving Falls, Gurganus dramatizes the passing of Hawthorne’s small-town nation into those Twitter-nourished lives we now expect and relish.
Four decades ago, John Cheever pronounced Allan Gurganus "the most technically gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation." Local Souls confirms Cheever’s prescient faith. It deepens the luster of Gurganus’s reputation for compassion and laughter. His black comedy leaves us with lasting affection for his characters and the aching aftermath of human consequences. Here is a universal work about a village.
Review
"The architecture of Allan Gurganus's storytelling is flawless. His narration becomes a Greek chorus, Sophocles in North Carolina. Gurganus makes the preternatural feel natural. Sexual taboos, a parent's worst fears: these emerge in tones comic and horrifying. Each novella delivers an ending of true force." New York Times Book Review
Review
"Allan Gurganus breathes so much life into the town of Falls, North Carolina, his reader is able to walk down the streets and mingle with the local souls. This book underscores what we have long known--Gurganus stands among the best writers of our time." New York Times Book Review
Review
" leaves the reader surfeited with gifts. This is a book to be read for the minutely tuned music of Gurganus's language, its lithe and wicked wit, its luminosity of vision--shining all the brighter for the heat of its compassion. These are tales to make us whole." Ann Patchett
Review
"Allan Gurganus gives us his all: A lifeline to the residents of Falls, N.C.--'The Fallen'--show us how to live with decency and yearning. Endlessly entertaining and original, this book sets a benchmark for contemporary fiction." Wells Tower
Review
"Allan Gurganus is our verbal magician. He turns factual rabbits into poetic doves. Every sentence contains a surprise, but the brilliant surface doesn't dazzle us from peering into the tender human depths." Ann Patchett
Review
"Allan Gurganus has the uncanny ability to make you laugh and shudder at the same time. That rare gift is on full and glorious display here." Edmund White
Review
"It's been 12 years since Gurganus last published a full-length work--but if there remains any doubt of his literary greatness, his fifth book, , should put it to rest forever.... A tour de force in the tradition of Hawthorne. It shows that Gurganus's vast creative and imaginative powers, still rooted in the local, are increasingly universal in scope and effect. The book is an expansive work of love...Gurganus moves beyond [Sherwood] Anderson and Faulkner in calling into question the very notion of 'inappropriate': the emotional misalignments in his fiction feel both understandable and familiar. Like Chekhov and Cheever before him, Gurganus registers an enormous amount of compassion for the characters he holds to the fire." Jamie Quatro
Review
"Vivid language, provocative sentence structure, and metaphors that elevate the reader's consciousness. [Gurganus] shares with his southern cohorts a delight in discovering the quotidian within lives led under extraordinary, even bizarre circumstances." T. C. Boyle
Synopsis
Allan Gurganus brings the twisted hilarity of Flannery O’Connor kicking into our new century in this literary event of 2013.
Synopsis
Wells Tower says of Gurganus, "No living writer knows more about how humans matter to each other." Such ties of love produce hilarious, if wrenching, complications: "Fear Not" gives us a banker's daughter seeking the child she was forced to surrender when barely fifteen, only to find an adult rescuer she might have invented. In "Saints Have Mothers," a beloved high school valedictorian disappears during a trip to Africa, granting her ambitious mother a postponed fame that turns against her. And in a dramatic "Decoy," the doctor-patient friendship between two married men breaks toward desire just as a biblical flood shatters their neighborhood and rearranges their fates.
Gurganus finds fresh pathos in ancient tensions: between marriage and Eros, parenthood and personal fulfillment. He writes about erotic hunger and social embarrassment with Twain's knife-edged glee. By loving Falls, Gurganus dramatizes the passing of Hawthorne s small-town nation into those Twitter-nourished lives we now expect and relish.
Four decades ago, John Cheever pronounced Allan Gurganus "the most technically gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation." Local Souls confirms Cheever s prescient faith. It deepens the luster of Gurganus s reputation for compassion and laughter. His black comedy leaves us with lasting affection for his characters and the aching aftermath of human consequences. Here is a universal work about a village.
"
Synopsis
Offering his first book in a decade, Allan Gurganus returns us to Falls, North Carolina, mythic site of his immortal Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. With three linked, darkly funny novellas, Gurganus charts the old habits—adultery, obsession, incest—still at large in his New South, a Winesburg, Ohio with high-speed Internet. In “Fear Not,” a banker’s daughter seeks the child she forcibly relinquished at birth. In “Saints Have Mothers,” the disappearance of a high-school valedictorian shatters the town, creating a cult led by her stricken mother. In “Decoy,” the eroticized friendship between two married men is tested at last by a devastating flood. Gurganus finds new pathos in old tensions: between marriage and Eros, with gigantic hopes battling small-town conventions. Told with comic brio and deep sympathy, Local Souls is a universal work about a village. Its black comedy leaves us with affection for its characters and an aching aftermath of human consequences.
Synopsis
With the meteoric success of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus placed himself among America’s most original and emotionally engaged storytellers. If his first comic novel mapped the late nineteenth-century South, Local Souls brings the twisted hilarity of Flannery O’Connor kicking into our new century.
About the Author
Alan Gurganus's, books include White People and Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Gurganus is a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Adaptations of his fiction have earned four Emmys. A resident of his native North Carolina, he lives in a village of six thousand souls.