The North Carolina Writers Conference July 28 – 29, 2017 Rocky Mount, NC Honoring Allan Gurganus Full Program Here: NCWC2017Program 2017 PROGRAM Friday, July 28 3:00-5:00 Conference Registration – Holiday Inn 200 […]
EP: “Saints Have Mothers” is going to be published in Italy in September and “Saint Monster” to be republished then, too. Both have saints in the title. And some sort […]
Author of “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All” and “Local Souls” describes the joys of living next to a cemetery for CBS Sunday Morning.
Podcast of Allan Gurganus reading at UCLA Hammer Library on October 10, 2013
Beauty Is Its Own Excuse: The novelist Allan Gurganus discovered the secret to happiness: collecting.
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.
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. For upcoming interviews or essays by Gurganus in “Library Journal”, “Kirkus Review”, “The Wall Street Journal” and “The New York Times Book Review” online website and “The New York Times”.