Local Souls

Through memorable language and bawdy humor, Gurganus returns to his mythological Falls, North Carolina, home of . 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, uncovers certain old habits--adultery, incest, obsession--still very much alive in our New South, a "Winesburg, Ohio" with high-speed Internet.

"Refreshing. . . . an antidote to the marketplace's mass message and massage. . . . The house of a master-magician-builder-writer. . . . Go ahead, step in, light up your life." Clyde Edgerton

"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." Garden & Gun

"Local Souls 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." John Irving

"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

"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." Garden & Gun

"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

"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

"Gurganus returns to Falls, N.C., the setting of his , with this trio of linked novellas.... In these layered, often funny narratives, close reading is rewarded as Gurganus exposes humanity as a strange species." Booklist

"[Local Souls] is an astounding testament to Gurganus's narrative vibrancy, faultless plotting, and Everyman/mythic vision…. Of living novelists in English, only Martin Amis and Cormac McCarthy can match Gurganus's pyrotechnical aptitude for language, for forging a verbiage both rapturous and exact. He's categorically incapable of crafting a dull sentence…. [He is] one of the most exciting fiction writers alive." Publishers Weekly, "Pick of the Week"

"Thoroughly enjoyable…. Here are finely rendered portraits—and, behind the faces, fascinating stories. Listen to the voices, so pitch perfect, the words, oh so readable. And Falls, home to the fallen; it's on the map. Come visit." William Giraldi Oxford American

"Each novella in ...is guided by the centrifugal force of memory, heart and a playful, agile mind...Let these novellas bring attention to the overlooked art form. They will please readers who have been waiting for more from an admired writer who is funny, appropriately dark and can magically twirl a sentence." Publishers Weekly, "Pick of the Week"

"The pleasures of Allan Gurganus' are pretty much the pleasures of fiction, period: the satisfactions of the tale and the surprise of the phrase, insights into the human condition and portraits from a particular place, a sharp sense of the physical world and a freshened awareness of the pulls and pains of social class. Pick a page and you'll find a sentence to love.... Dazzling." Elizabeth Taylor Chicago Tribune, Editor's Choice

"The beloved author whose literary bona fides rank him among the most revered writers of the last 50 years, Gurganus has an eye for gesture large and small, an ear for voice at once razor-sharp and tender, and a way with finding the absolutely precise moment of dramatic tension." Kevin Fenton Minneapolis Star Tribune

"This book underscores what we have long known--Gurganus stands among the best writers of our time." --Ann Patchett

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.

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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.