A New York Times Notable Book: The idiosyncratic genius of Padgett Powell shines through in nine stories that bend the conventions of short fiction.Padgett Powell's literary stage is a blurred vision of the American South. His characters are bored, sad, assured, confused, deluded, and often just one step away from madness. The stories they populate are madder still, delivered by a voice enthralling and distinctive.Whether he's chronicling a housewife's encour...

Twenty-three surreal fictions—stories, character assassinations, and mini-travelogues—from one of the most heralded writers of the American SouthThere are many things that repulse "Dr. Ordinary." "Kansas" is notable for its distinct lack of farmland. "Wayne's Fate" is most unfortunate, not merely for Wayne but for the roofer pal who stands by watching his good buddy lose his head. "Miss Resignation" simply cannot win at Bingo. And there is nothing "Typical" about th...

A special two-in-one edition of National Book Award finalist Padgett Powell's acclaimed southern novels: Edisto and Edisto RevisitedIn Edisto, Simons Everson Manigault is not a typical twelve-year-old boy in tiny Edisto, South Carolina , in the late 1960s. At the insistence of his challenging mother, who believes her son to possess a capacity for genius, Simons immerses himself in great literature and becomes as literate a...

A housewife revels in the secret world of her mind filled with historical characters and twisted love stories in this inventive sendup of Southern fiction.Mrs. Hollingsworth sits at her kitchen table, compiling her grocery list. The subject of the list is not foodstuffs, but memories that never happened, inventions of loves, and strange conspiracies peopled by men who appear in the lonely housewife's head—men infinitely more real to her than her own husband....

Finalist for the National Book Award: Through the eyes of a precocious twelve-year-old in a seaside South Carolina town, the world of love, sex, friendship, and betrayal blossomsSimons Everson Manigault is not a typical twelve-year-old boy in tiny Edisto, South Carolina , in the late 1960s. At the insistence of his challenging mother (known to local blacks as "the Duchess"), who believes her son to possess a capacity for genius, Simons immerses hims...

The first collection of nonfiction by "one of the few truly important American writers of our time" (Sam Lipsyte).Gathering pieces written during the past three decades, Indigo ranges widely in subject matter and tone, opening with “Cleve Dean,” which takes Padgett Powell to Sweden for the World Armwrestling Federation Championships, through to its closing title piece, which charts Powell’s lifelong fascination with the endangered indigo snake, “a thinking...

Hailed by Time as an "extravagantly comic" novel, A Woman Named Drown is a wild and strange journey through America's South that follows a young PhD dropout who falls in with an amateur actress–cum-pool sharkOn the brink of earning his doctorate in chemistry, the unnamed narrator decides to chuck it all away in favor of real life. So begins an odd pilgrimage through the American South. In Tennessee, our hero is bewitched by an older, gin-swilling, ...

In the sequel to Powell's acclaimed debut, Edisto, Simons Manigault is older—if not particularly wiser—and searching for the cure to his restlessness in memory, travel, and forbidden loveFourteen years after we first met Simons Manigault, our protagonist is newly graduated from Clemson University, bored, unfocused, and idling his summer away at his mother's home in Edisto, South Carolina. Not yet ready to fully embrace adulthood, Simons finds himself surren...

Padgett Powell, author of the acclaimed The Interrogative Mood and “one of the few truly important American writers of our time” (Sam Lipsyte), returns with a hilarious Southern send-up of Samuel Beckett’s classic Waiting for Godot.Truly a master of envelope-pushing, post-postmodern American fiction, in a class with Nicholas Baker and Lydia Davis, Powell brilliantly blends the sublime, the trivial, and the oddball in You & Me, as two loquacious gents on a...

Named a Best Book of 2015 by NPR and Vanity Fair"Rifles through fear, identity, meaning, and cultural memory in forty–four short, surreal stories." —Vanity Fair"By turns moving, funny, and maddening…. very much in the key of Donald Barthelme." —The New York Times Book Review"Somehow both grounded and absurd, each one of the stories trying get at that heart of the confusion and sadness at the core of contemporary life." —

“If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel (and maybe they did. Did they?) it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell’s.”—Richard FordThe Interrogative Mood is a wildly inventive, jazzy meditation on life and language by the novelist that Ian Frazier hails as “one of the best writers in America, and one of the funniest, too.” A novel composed entirely of questions, it is perhaps the most audacious literary high-wire act since Nichol...

»Sind Ihre Gefühle rein? Wie stehen Sie zur Kartoffel? Sollte es immer noch Konstantinopel heißen? Haben Kinder Ihrer Ansicht nach einen Geruch? Wenn Sie jetzt welchen hätten, würden Sie Hundekuchen essen? Sind Sie glücklich? Ist Ihnen klar, warum ich Ihnen all diese Fragen stelle?« Auch ohne zu wissen, warum Padgett Powell all diese Fragen stellt, kann man sich der Faszination, die von dieser irritierend direkten Leseransprache ausgeht, nicht entziehen: Das Gehirn springt an und nimmt mit...