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...

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...

"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...

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...

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 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...

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, ...

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....

“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...

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...

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...

Blasphemy and Other Ancestors is comprised of four novellas, in which authors Padgett Powell, Darius James, Lee Henderson, and Jean Marc Ah-Sen explore the tag end of existence and the abasements that memory holds in store for characters living "outside of their time."In Blasphemy and Other Ancestors, a Southern man of letters tries to instruct his assistant on the matters of the heart, a self-centered telephile recounts how his aunt taught him about the world bey...