William Gay Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Long Home (1999)
  2. Provinces of Night (2000)
  3. Twilight (2006)
  4. Little Sister Death (2015)
  5. Stoneburner (2017)
  6. The Lost Country (2018)
  7. Fugitives of the Heart (2021)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down (2002)
  2. Wittgenstein’s Lolita and The Iceman (2006)
  3. The Streets of Paris (2019)

Poetry Books In Publication Order

  1. Time Done Been Won’t Be No More (2010)
  2. The Complete Poetical Works of William Gay (2015)
  3. Sonnets and Other Verses (2015)
  4. Christ on Olympus, and Other Poems (2015)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Poetry Book Covers

William Gay Books Overview

The Long Home

In a literary voice that is both original and powerfully unsettling, William Gay tells the story of Nathan Winer, a young and headstrong Tennessee carpenter who lost his father years ago to a human evil that is greater and closer at hand than any the boy can imagine until he learns of it first hand. Gay’s remarkable debut novel, The Long Home, is also the story of Amber Rose, a beautiful young woman forced to live beneath that evil, who recognizes even as a child that Nathan is her first and last chance at escape. And it is the story of William Tell Oliver, a solitary old man who watches the growing evil from the dark woods and adds to his own weathered guilt by failing to do anything about it. Set in rural Tennessee in the 1940s, The Long Home will bring to mind once again the greatest Southern novelists and will haunt the reader with its sense of solitude, longing, and the deliverance that is always just out of reach. A 1999 New York Times Book Review Notable Book Finalist, SEBA Book Award in Fiction

Provinces of Night

In 1999 William Gay’s debut novel The Long Home signaled the arrival of a bold new voice in American fiction. In a rave review in the New York Times Book Review, Tony Earley wrote, ‘In the high tradition of the Southern novel, Gay is unafraid to tackle the biggest of the big themes, nor does he shy away from the grand gesture that makes those themes manifest,’ and the Denver Post heralded it as ‘a novel of great emotional power.’ With Provinces of Night, Gay’s talent is undeniable. The year is 1952, and E. F. Bloodworth has returned to his home a forgotten corner of Tennessee after twenty years of roaming. The wife he walked out on has withered and faded, his three sons are grown and angry. Warren is a womanizing alcoholic, Boyd is driven by jealousy to hunt down his wife’s lover, and Brady puts hexes on his enemies from his mamma’s porch. Only Fleming, the old man’s grandson, treats him with the reverence his age commands, and sees past all the hatred to realize the way it can poison a man’s soul. Fleming, a seventeen year old dreamer, interprets this seemingly stark world with the uncynical wit and wisdom of the young. When he encounters Raven Lee, a sloe eyed beauty from a neighboring town, he slowly finds the courage to face this family curse. In a tale redolent with the crumbling loyalties and age old strife of the South, Gay’s characters inhabit a world driven by blood ties that strangle as they bind.

Twilight

From the acclaimed author of Provinces of Night, a Southern gothic novel about an undertaker who won t let the dead rest. Suspecting that something is amiss with their father’s burial, teenager Kenneth Tyler and his sister Corrie venture to his gravesite and make a horrific discovery: their father, a whiskey bootlegger, was not actually buried in the casket they bought for him. Worse, they learn that the undertaker, Fenton Breece, has been grotesquely manipulating the dead. Armed with incriminating photographs, Tyler becomes obsessed with bringing the perverse undertaker to justice. But first he must outrun Granville Sutter, a local strongman and convicted murderer hired by Fenton to destroy the evidence. What follows is an adventure through the Harrikin, an eerie backwoods filled with tangled roads, rusted machinery, and eccentric squatters old men, witches, and families among them who both shield and imperil Tyler as he runs for safety. With his poetic, haunting prose, William Gay rewrites the rules of the gothic fairytale while exploring the classic Southern themes of good and evil.

The Lost Country

William Gay’s picaresque The Lost Country follows four people on the road: a young sailor hitchhiking to Tennessee from the West Coast, a one armed con man, a kid dodging the law, and an enigmatic young woman who has fled her sordid and abusive home life. Everybody’s looking for something redemption, revenge, a moment of grace and their separate paths will eventually intersect in the town of Ackerman’s Field, where these four disparate storylines will be inextricably drawn together.

Another powerfully unsettling novel by the master of the southern gothic, The Lost Country confirms William Gay s reputation as one of the most talented and prolific contemporary authors in the south and beyond.

I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down

William Gay firmly established himself as ‘the big new name to include in the storied annals of Southern Lit’ ‘Esquire’ with his debut novel, ‘The Long Home,’ and his critically acclaimed follow up, ‘Provinces of Night.’ Like Faulkner’s Mississippi and Cormac McCarthy’s American West, Gay’s Tennessee is redolent of broken, colorful souls hard at work charting the pathos of their interior lives. His debut collection, ‘I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down,’ brings together what Gay’s dedicated readers are eager for and what new readers will find the perfect introduction to his world: thirteen stories that are mined from this same fertile soil teeming with the grizzled, everyday folk that Gay is famous for bringing to life. In these pages readers meet old man Meecham, who escapes from his new nursing home only to find his son has rented their homestead to ‘white trash’; Quincy Nell Qualls, who not only falls in love with the town lothario but, pregnant, is faced with an inescapable end when he abandons her; Finis and Doneita Beasley, whose forty year marriage is broken up by a dead dog; Bobby Pettijohn, who is awakened in the middle of the night by the noise and lights of a search party looking for clues after a body is discovered in his backwoods. William Gay expertly sets these conflicted people who make bad choices in life and love against lush back country scenery, and somehow manages to defy moral logic as we grow to love his characters for the weight of their human errors. Diverse as these tales are, what connects them is the powerful voice of a born storyteller.

Time Done Been Won’t Be No More

Time Done Been Won’t Be No More: Collected Prose by William Gay is a collection of short stories, essays, memoirs and an interview. William Gay is well known for his fiction but he is also widely published with his essays, mostly dealing with music, and his memoirs. This is the first collection that includes his nonfiction prose. The elegant use of language that his readers have come to expect is as evident in his collected prose as it is in his novels.

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