It’s 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he’s been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won’t be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he’s an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.’s grandson, is pleased with the old man’s homecoming, but Fleming’s life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.
In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption–a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.
William Gay was the author of the novels The Long Home and Provinces of Night. His fiction appeared in Harper’s and AtlanticMonthly, among others, and he won the William Peden Award and the James Michener Memorial Prize. He passed away in 2012.
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It’s 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he’s been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won’t be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he’s an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.’s grandson, is pleased with the old man’s homecoming, but Fleming’s life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.
In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption–a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.
Provinces of Night is simply brilliant. William Gay writes with such
astonishing clarity and authenticity that every single word inside this book
rings true. Poetic and visceral, his words excavate a corner of the South
with a new standard of excellence and readers and writers everywhere are the
better for it. A must-read for anyone aware of the changing pulse of
American literature. — (Melinda Haynes, author of Mother of Pearl)
Barry Hannah
A staggering talent. Almost a personal revival of handwork in
fiction--superb--must be listened to and felt. — (Barry Hannah, author of Airships and Geronimo Rex)
Tom Franklin
Provinces of Night is one magnificent achievement, a wise, spare,
hilarious, bighearted tale delivered in language as lovely as the Tennessee
hills at dusk. To the list of premier Southern writers that includes Harry
Crews, Barry Hannah, and Lewis Nordan, add the name of William Gay. — (Tom Franklin, author of Poachers)
Steve Yarbrough
It is time to stop calling William Gay an exciting new voice. In Provinces of Night he proves that he is simply one of our finest voices. — (Steve Yarbrough, author of The Oxygen Man)
Elwood Reid
Provinces of Night is an old-fashioned barrel-aged shot of Tennessee
storytelling. Gay's tale of ancient wrongs and men with guns is high-proof
stuff. — (Elwood Reid, author of What Salmon Know and Midnight Sun)
I grew up in Colorado and went to college in Indiana, and yet somehow all of my favorite English teachers were from the South. They taught me to relish colorful storytelling, with dashes of gothic grotesque and decay, and dished me up heaping helpings of the good stuff, including plenty of Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale […]
