The Hanged Man

by Katherine Conner

Overview

Against the surreal landscape of the deep south, three Lebanese-American sisters encounter their missing mother six years after she vanished from their lives. Georgia, now a ghost tour guide in the French Quarter, spots her mother’s face in the crowd of tour-goes. Virginia, a receptionist at a mental health facility in Mississippi, is sure her mother walks in one day and asks to be committed. Louise, a relay operator in Birmingham, hears her mother’s voice late one night on the line. Each of these encounters is fleeting, almost ghostly, ambiguous. Is it really her, their mother, the woman who packed their grandmother’s trousseau and walked out of their lives without a word all those years ago? Or is she a vision, a ghost, no more than a memory?

Steeped in the Southern Gothic tradition, in the vein of Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Jesmyn Ward, this atmospheric collection of linked stories explores our complex relationship with loss and our desperate search for meaning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625572219
Publisher:	Black Lawrence Press
Publication date:	08/04/2026
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Katherine Conner is a Lebanese-American writer from Mississippi. Her collection of short stories, The Hanged Man, was a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award, the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, and the Iron Horse Literary Review First Book Prize. Her short stories have appeared in several literary magazines, including West Branch, Pembroke Magazine, Willow Springs, Shenandoah, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, Fugue, Surreal South, The Chattahoochee Review, The Portland Review, Raleigh Review, and elsewhere.

Table of Contents

Percipient

Neshoba

Mummy Baby

The Hanged Man

Relay Operator

Double Walker

The High Priestess

Editorial Reviews

Does Katherine Conner’s wonderful collection of stories, The Hanged Man, draw from the tropes of Southern Gothic? It does indeed. Arrestingly. But she does it her way, making sure that we are just as deeply engaged with the longing for connectedness, for self, that is the hallmark of literature of all traditions. This is a splendid debut from a remarkable new writer. —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize Winner for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Haunting, heart-rending and distinctly southern, Katherine Conner’s The Hanged Man explores memory and myth through the lens of three Maronite sisters and the specter of their missing mother. Dappled with four-armed fetuses and plastic-wrapped bats, paranormal researchers and ‘double-walkers,’ and, of course, sundry ghosts, The Hanged Man transcends the gothic and macabre to penetrate the depths of human loss and longing. From Louisiana’s French Quarter to Mississippi’s Neshoba County, Conner populates her fractured landscape with unsettling suggestions of a world beyond our own. Conner is a modern-day Faulkner, but a Faulkner who channels a parallel universe, and in The Hanged Man, she offers a tour de force revealed through apparitions. Uncannily brilliant! —Jacob M. Appel, author of Scouting for the Reaper

From the Publisher