Customer Reviews

Airships

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I can always tell a great book by the fact I'm constantly thinking of bits I'd like to steal while reading. By that criteria, reading Airships was like being tossed in a jewlery store at night without any security around.

Airships is a collection of stories about war, sex, airplanes and horses. The usual, but done with incredible style and energy. I find that far too much modern short fiction is so polished and calculated it comes out as a dulled diamond (or more often polished stone), but Hannah's work is full of the rough, gritty, loose writing that draws you in like possessed jungle vines and then you get attacked by a Panther or something.

A few of the stories fall short and at least one didn't work at all for me, but I'll still give it a big ol' A+

A wonderful collection of stories that made me laugh outloud more than anything since the first time I read Celine. From one story to the next I was trully captivated. What sets him apart from other writers is his T.S. Eliot - like gift to come up with phrases that ring in your head like coins for years to come. No writer ever has been able to sum up a character in a single sentence like Hannah. Her husband was an intellectual in real estate... etc. The same is true in other volumes. Latouche (with metaphysical approaches named after him), is a good example.

I am not yet published but have written nine novels and hope my day will come soon. Hannah along with Richard Ford, Cormack McCarthy, Flaubert, Rilke, Celine, and Peter Handke, are my all-time favorites. Thanks for the inspiration!

This is one of the greatest short story collections/cycles in the history of the form. To hell with political correctness. When the smoke of overeducated ignorance clears from the last half of this century, Airships will be canonical.

A hilarious, trenchant, and effervescently surreal examination of a range of situations and (mainly Southern) characters. The writer covers artists, cannibals, Civil War soldiers, and yes, even some racists and misogynists. All are brilliantly imagined and colored with Hannah's almost insane inventiveness and wit. An excellent, challenging set of stories that stretches the confines of great writing. Not for grannies or traditionalists.

Airships is a book that breaks apart expectations of what the short form can do. The language is so exacting and unique as to put this book in a league of its own. The stories are themselves alternately Gothic and realistic, but regardless of the mode, the intelligence behind the narrative is plain scary. The story "Testimony of Pilot" may be the single best short story I've ever read. When I pick up this book, I literally feel my pulse quicken. Hannah is one hell of an amusement ride. This is a great intro to the rest of his work.

As a young man, this collection of stories catapaulted me into the fascinating world of stories and writing. I have since become a published author, and have never forgotten the passion for the written word that this book of eccentric, violent, strange and often hilarious stories instilled in me. I felt the need to defend this colletion from the ignoramus who misinterpreted Hannah's work, calling him a rascist and misogynist.

Barry Hannah is a great Southern writer, to be sure, but he's also just a flat out great writer. This collection is intense, hillarious, joyful, heartbreaking and sometimes very, very weird. It is magnificent. Don't stop with this one, though. Read RAY. Read GERONIMO REX. Read BATS OUT OF HELL. Hell, read everything you can get your grubby little hands on. I've never gone away from a Barry Hanna book disappointed or unchanged.

Running through these stories feels like listing to the tracks off a really good album. Plenty of spicy, but pretty writing. Two of Hannah's favorite words are "fraud" and "organ" (his way of describing genitalia). Have fun with it.

I admired this collection a lot. It is filled with beautiful, mostly inventive writing that features a collective whoop of good humor. Hannah is a sharp and strong and quite powerful writer and he has an ability to strip away characters until they are a raw,bloody pulp. He sees and knows and condemns these people too well, like he knows too much of this stuff and has spent all his life in contempt. This isn't, necessarily, a bad thing, and in Hannah's able hands many of the stories are legitimate treats, comprehension be damned!

But the sore root of this collection (aside from our individual tastes) is the sometimes clamouring of a drunken voice (probably legitimately drunken and occasionally veering into misunderstanding) that has some great things to say but too often finds itself distracted by an irritating minutiea. Sure, the blood and the sadness give several of these tales a needed visceral edge, the kind of voice that drags you there into the eye of the beast that is man. At other times the figures are too literal parodies, muscousy germs that struggle in the petry dish of the frequently cruel author's imagination.

In the end I would definately recommend Airships for the consistantly far-reaching attempts that these little stories of nobodies set out to explore--four or five of them I thought were absolutely wonderful. I would just offer a casual warning that a certain stretch may come when you're tired of trying so hard and find yourself simply not caring about what happens next. This is a very human reaction and one that is usually offered with the sometime forgiveness of a desire to someday return to such potential. This is a book to look over when in a mood of focused patience when you are willing to spend a week or two starting and stopping through a few pictures of hilarious misery that are warped at the edges by an ambitious refrain.

If you're about to choose your first Barry Hannah book, buy this one to see what all of the fuss has been about all of these years.