I just love a great novel full of short stories. #Author Allan Gurganus's novel # The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus is perfect to buy as a real book and throw in your bag for appointments!! 💜🐾🐾
Ten classic tales for those over eighteen. Offering characters quite different. One being about a mortician whose dedication exceeds all legal limits.....
Thank you for the advance copy,
#Netgalley, # Allan Gurganus, and # W. W. Norton Company

Gurganus excels at capturing a very specific voice--that of a Southern-born, occasionally churchgoing small town figure (usually male, often gay). In its informality, colloquial and provincial tones, the voice nearly always rings true--particularly in the types of leaps of thought we're all prey to, even when we're trying to tell a story from A to Z. It's this discursiveness--and the sheer poetry of much of his prose--that makes Gurganus always worth reading. Recommended.

I immediately became a fan of Allan Gurganus through this short story collection. A young, smart-aleck, entitled college kid is sent out to find outsider art, only to be sucked into a story told by an old woman in a small town, both of which he'd held in contempt, yet the story she tells changes the trajectory of his life. While the water rises to envelop his house, a retired gentleman takes his boat around his neighborhood picking up his neighbors, and ends up across town to rescue strangers. A tour guide continues her jubilant effervescent narrative even as she awaits the ambulance for her injury. Gurganus shows how seemingly tenuous connections can capture one's soul and encompass the mind. The characters are superfluous to their circumstances, held aloft within their tales. I recommend this collection to anyone who is fascinated by people in general, or old white male writers who seem to get it. I was fortunate to receive a digital copy from the publisher Liveright through NetGalley.

3.75 stars

I had only read the Oldest Confederate Widow by Gurganus and thought his short stories might be illustrated. He is a masterful writer. His at times folksy language hides some penetrating truths, and several of these stores reminded me of Flannery O'Connor, high praise.

He is that eccentric Southern writer, and the story themes bear that out: a young boy who is picked up by a tornado and has a few moments of naked flight, a widowed insurance salesman who picks up flood victims from their rooftops in his bass boat, an old DAR member who unravels during a local history tour she is leading and more. Offbeat, verging on morbid, but funny and real. Thanks to the publisher and to Net Galley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

What can I say about Gurganus that hasn't already been said? He's a master of the form, a Southern yarn-spinner out of the 19th century, Twain by way of a Greek chorus. "Country Doctor," the New Yorker story, is an absolute masterwork, a Babuskha-doll tale about American pandemic suffering by way of folk art and academia. "My Heart is a Snake Farm" is Tiger King before Tiger King had been invented--a literal snake charmer starts a popular sideshow in Florida and seduces an old virginal librarian who runs the adjacent motel. His stories are colorful, voice-driven, literary yet approachable. One of our best living writers.

As I read this marvelous collection I also happened to be reading 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter' by Carson McCullers. I don't know anything about the definition of "Southern Gothic,' and I suspect the definition has something more to do with subject than it does with style, but even so I felt there was something similar going on in the works of these two great authors. There is a similar density of meaning in each sentence. By ''density,' I don't mean complicatedness, or intellectualism, or erudition, or difficulty--not at all. It's that each sentence seems so densely packed with description, and movement, and sound, and meaning. Gurganus's prose makes the way most other writers go about using up space on the page seem profligate by comparison.

The rhythms of the stories in this collection are less frenetic and outsized to me than the other works I've read by Gurganus. These stories remind me more than usual of John Cheever's work--stylistically precise, with a flourish of something breathlessly beautiful coming along, now and then, to open my heart, and to remind me of the humanity of us. This is why I read.

Like may readers, I met Allan Gurganus in the extremely long but not nearly long enough novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. If you haven't had the pleasure of his acquaintance, this collection of short stories should convince you to seek out and enjoy all of his not extensive work . I am not a fan of humorous fiction, but found myself laughing out loud during the baby shower gone awry in the 1991 White People. Gurganus is a shining star in the firmament of Southern fiction which, we all know is a guilty pleasure no matter where you were hatched.

An incredibly witty writer with an immensely vibrant. Most of these stories are hilarious and expertly crafted. Gurganus knows how to use the short form to his advantage, and it shows.