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.
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, “Local Souls,” should put it to rest forever. A triptych of novellas set on the banks of the River Lithium in the same fictional town of Falls, N.C., where most of his work has taken place, “Local Souls” is 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 with not a sentence that (as Gurganus once said regarding Hannah) “hasn’t first been sung aloud at 3 a.m. beside some river at a hunting camp.” The prose is taut with the electric charge of internal rhyme, assonance and alliteration. Each touch yields an invigorating shock: “Numbers numbed the male ache, offered some sort of splint. They spared men the slack wet press of full female Emotion.” Or: “Student adolescence keeps walls infused with a sebaceous sweetness akin to curry.” Or: “Even to herself she seemed overdetermined, annealed, fused too early by some smelter’s blast into being one thing only.”