December’s issue of Well Read Magazine features the round table discussion with the William Gay Archive contributors that was published in Stories From the Attic, as well as a photographed excerpt from The Long Home, with editing suggestions by Cormac McCarthy. Concluding a four part series, we would like to thank everyone at Well Read for their support and enthusiasm.
Well Read Magazine is an online publication and is available for free. Follow this link to view.
A review of the latest William Gay collection by Wayne Catan, of Chapter 16, a community of Tennessee writers, readers, and passerby, from June 27, 2022.
The final book from the William Gay Archive has been released. What began as This Ride Ain’t Over Yet, an early attempt at collecting posthumous short works, Stories from the Attic contains previously unpublished short stories, memoirs, and fragments. The book includes a preface by J.M. White, and concludes with a question and answer with the team of editors that have worked on the publication.
From Dzanc Books:
“From a celebrated master of the Southern Gothic comes a last collection of hard-hitting short fiction, his final posthumous work.
Beloved for his novels Twilight, The Long Home, and The Lost Country and his groundbreaking collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, William Gay returns with one final posthumous collection of short stories, adapted from the archive found after his death in February 2012. In addition to previously unpublished short stories, Stories from the Attic includes fragments from two of the unpublished novels that were works in progress at the time of his death.
Marked by his signature skill and bare-knuckled insight, this collection is a must-read for William Gay devotees and fans of Southern short fiction.”
$26.95
Publication Date: July 17, 2022
Hardcover: 348 pages
ISBN: 9781950539451
William Gay editor and enthusiast Dawn Major will be discussing William Gay as part of this year’s Revival: Lost Southern Voices Festival. Registering information is below.
The sixth Revival: Lost Southern Voices is March 24 - 26, 2022. Revival: Lost Southern Voices is a festival for readers that celebrates historically excluded, erased, or marginalized Southern voices. During this annual conference, invited presenters discuss Southern authors or artists whose works are out-of-print or otherwise do not receive the attention they deserve. We invite the public, scholars, students, writers, and inquisitive readers to join the conversation as we continue to discover and revive these Lost Southern Voices. The conference will be virtual again this year, and we have six truly exciting panels. There will be two Zoom panels each day of the conference, one at 1 p.m. ET, and the other at 4 p.m. ET. Several are themed on specific authors or events in Atlanta's past.
Here is the schedule, as well as links to register:
Thursday, March 24, 2022
Panel 1 - Literature, Art, and Music from Lost Southern Voices
1 p.m. ET, Zoom Webinar
Moderator: Josh Russell
Jim Clark: Don West, poet and social activist
Caroline Herring: Hedy West, musician
Dawn Major: William Gay, author and painter
Register here.
Panel 2 - Rediscovering Frank Yerby
4 p.m. ET, Zoom Webinar
Moderator: Eli Arnold
Valerie Matthews, Yerby scholar
Veronica Watson, Yerby scholar
Matthew Teutsch, Yerby scholar
Register here.
Friday, March 25, 2022
Panel 3 - "It's Never Been Over": Generational Trauma and the Atlanta Child Murders
1 p.m. ET, Zoom Webinar
Moderator: Jessica Handler
Maurice Hobson, historian
Calinda Lee, historian
Vern Smith, journalist
Register here.
Panel 4 - These Bones Are Not My Child: The Life and Work of Toni Cade Bambara
4 p.m. ET, Zoom Webinar
Moderator: Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Bambara scholar
Linda Holmes, Bambara biographer
Louis Massiah, Bambara filmmaker
Register here.
Saturday, March 26, 2022
Panel 5 -The Life and Work of John Oliver Killens
1 p.m. ET, Zoom Webinar
Moderator: Matt Dischinger
Tina McElroy Ansa, novelist and Killens devotee
Register here.
Panel 6 - The Day Atlanta Stood Still: Atlanta and The Legacy of the Orly Plane Crash
4 p.m. ET, Zoom Webinar
Moderator: Jim Auchmutey
Baxter Jones, arts philanthropist
Chris Moser, documentary director
Register here.
As part of this year's conference, there will be raffles! More information on those is coming soon. Follow the festival on Facebook at @RevivalLostSouthernVoices, Twitter (@RevivalLost) and Instagram (revivallsv) for updates! You can also watch last year's conference on the Georgia Center for the Book's YouTube channel here.
The posthumous short story collection, Stories from the Attic, is now available for preorder from Dzanc Books. We began working on collecting and editing these pages in 2012 and it is exciting to see them finally published. Another gracious thank you to Michelle Dotter and everyone at Dzanc Books for their work and dedication to this project.
From Dzanc:
From a celebrated master of the Southern Gothic comes a last collection of hard-hitting short fiction, his final posthumous work
Beloved for his novels Twilight, The Long Home, and The Lost Country and his groundbreaking collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, William Gay returns with one final posthumous collection of short stories, adapted from the archive found after his death in February 2012. In addition to previously unpublished short stories, Stories from the Attic includes fragments from two of the unpublished novels that were works in progress at the time of his death.
Marked by his signature skill and bare-knuckled insight, this collection is a must-read for William Gay devotees and fans of Southern short fiction.
The last posthumous novel by William Gay, Fugitives of the Heart, has been published by The University of West Alabama’s Livingston Press and is currently available at their store.
With this writing, William Gay has offered admirable homage to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Marion Yates, a teenage orphan, is taken in by an ex-schoolteacher named Black Crowe. The boy in turn cares for Crowe when he is temporarily disabled by a dynamite blast. Every hardscrabble thing we have come to expect from Gay lies in this novel, including an offbeat and dark humor. With a forward by Sonny Brewer and afterward by J.M. White.
The William Gay Archive’s own Dawn Major has written an excellent review of the book herself for the Southern Literary Review.
Five Points is a literary journal of poetry, fiction, essays, interviews and art. The Five Points podcast strives to create discussion beyond the pages of the journal and engage readers with new content. The second episode centers on volume 19, issue # 3 of Five Points. It features friends and poets Chad Davidson and Gregory Fraser reading and reflecting on one another’s work, and a conversation with Dawn Major about the work—prose and painting alike—of the late William Gay. For more Five Points content, please visit our website, http://fivepoints.gsu.edu/.
We have completed editing the manuscript for Fugitives of the Heart, the last novel to be released posthumously by the William Gay Archive. The book will be released by the University of Alabama Press in the Spring of 2021.
The story follows the adventures and wanderings of adolescent Yates, as he navigates himself between Allen’s Creek, Ackerman’s Field, and the Harrikin.
The editors of the William Gay Archive and Dzanc Books are featured in a roundtable interview within the Volume 38.2-3 Fall 2018/Winter 2019 issue of The Chattahoochee Review. Michelle Dotter of Dzanc Books, Lamont Ingalls, Sheila Kennedy, Susan McDonald, Paul Nitsche, and Michael White discuss William Gay’s ongoing legacy and the releasing of his posthumous works.
The Chattahoochee Review is a literary journal published by Perimeter College at Georgia State University.
The Lost Country was recently chosen as one of Southern Living’s Best Southern Books of the Year 2018.
Raise your glass to William Gay. Today The Lost Country is released on Dzanc Books. Order your copy from Dzanc here, or Amazon here, or your support your local booksellers.
Ten years after it was first announced, The Lost Country is to be released on July 10, 2018 from Dzanc Books.
“The language and the imagery Gay uses is so vividly haunting that I want to savor it all. Definitely a must-read for fans of Southern Literature.”
—Catherine Bock, Parnassus Books
“Like so many fans of Gay's, I've been waiting to read this seemingly mythical work, The Lost Country, for quite some time....Gay's elegiac prose sings once again as he breathes life into his characters and mines his patch of soil with the skill of the old masters. The Lost Country is the story of Billy Edgewater and his hard journey through a post World War II South filled with the downtrodden—hucksters, racists, drunks, bad or lost men and women, all trying to make it in a harsh rural setting that is unforgiving yet beautiful. It's a helluva good ride and I can't wait to recommend it.”
—Cody Morrison, Square Books
“The Lost Country lands like a shimmering gift from the beyond. For those of us who cherish and honor Gay's tremendous talent, his bold method of seeing the waste and wonder we are, this posthumous novel is a reminder of what we miss: the language pitched toward the sublime, his men and women grappling for redemption in a world that has damned them, his understanding of grace in the presence of human badness. When Gay died too soon, we lost much, but The Lost Country gives a piece of him back to us.”
—William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark
“The novel exposes us to a deliciously dark southern underbelly, one that, when paired with its sparse, lean prose and quiet intensity, becomes incredibly mesmerizing.”
—The Next Best Book Club
For ordering and more information, please visit Dzanc Books.
A radio interview with J.M. White from April 2018 regarding finding the manuscript of The Lost Country and Little Sister Death, along with observations about what it was like to get to know William Gay and his place in modern literature.
We are finally able to announce that Stoneburner, our first posthumous William Gay publishing effort on Anomolaic Press, is available at Amazon.com. From all of us at the Archive, thank you for your support and we hope you enjoy this new novel.
We are finalizing the final proof of The Lost Country, to be published by Dzanc Books in July, 2018. Words cannot describe how exciting it is to get the advance reader and see all of our hard work realized. Everyone at the William Gay Archive is grateful to Dzanc Books and Publisher and Editor in chief Michelle Dotter for their dedication in seeing this book through.
Stoneburner has been printed and is slowly making its way to Amazon distributors. We were of the understanding that the book would be available in February, but it is apparent the distribution is taking longer than we thought.
Thanks to everyone for your patience. We will announce when Stoneburner is up on Amazon, and make available the corresponding link. There is no target release date for Amazon distribution, but hopefully it will be within a couple of weeks.
We are excited to announce that Stoneburner, the second posthumous novel from William Gay, is now out and is available through Amazon.com. The book is published by the William Gay Archive, under the imprint Anomolaic Press.
From the description at Amazon:
"Stoneburner is a hardboiled detective story written as only William Gay could do it. The story is set in the mid 1970s and includes a jaded private eye named Stoneburner, a redneck Vietnam vet named Thibodeaux, a beautiful young blonde named Cathy Meecham and an ex-Sheriff named Cap Holder loosely based on Buford Pusser. Stoneburner is the private eye who has abandoned his office in Memphis to live on the banks of the Tennessee River where he is building a cabin. The story follows him as he meets a local retired sheriff who made a fortune when Hollywood produced a movie based on his exploits cleaning up the drug dealers in his rural county. However, now the Sheriff, Cap Holder, has run through the money on ill conceived business plans, fancy cars, big boats and expensive young girlfriends. He comes to Stoneburner when his plans to recoup his losses on a coke deal goes wrong and the young girlfriend turns up missing, both at the same time.
Cap wants Stoneburner to find both the money and the girl. The redneck named Thibodeaux just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time and was able to make off with a briefcase full of drug money and the young blonde. Thibodeaux and the girl are on the run, moving across Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas, leaving a trail a mile wide with Stoneburner not far behind. Thibodeaux and the girl buy a Cadillac purportedly owned by Elvis which eventually ends up in the top of a tree in the Ozarks. Stoneburner quickly figures out that he is not the only person that wants to find Thibodeaux. The drug lord, a local Nashville music producer, who was supplying the cocaine is on the trail as well.
The book follows two tracks, starting with Thibodeaux who is living in rural Tennessee and getting by as best he can. He is a town drunk constantly in trouble with the law, leaving behind a string of wrecked cars and trucks. However, his luck changes one night when he figures out someone is using an abandoned airstrip to fly in drugs and cases it out until one night a plane lands and he is able to make off with a briefcase full of cash. Once he has the money he is able to pick up the blonde, who was double-crossing both Cap Holder and the drug dealers, and away they go."
The manuscript was edited by J.M. White, Lamont Ingalls, Paul Nitsche, Sheila Kennedy, and Susan McDonald.
Jacket cover painting by William Gay.
Jacket design by Paul Nitsche.
Book design by Earl Madden and Paul Nitsche.
Welcome to the website for the William Gay Archive. We are excited to bring you a platform to disseminate news, writings, paintings, and photographs of the great Southern writer William Gay, who left us in 2012. Our goal is to keep you updated on the posthumous book releases from our imprint, Anomolaic Press, as well as other publishers as they handle the material.
We encourage you to contact us with any questions or comments. We would love to hear from you.
