Barry Hannah, Long, Last, Happy ** 1/2

I had high hopes for this collection of stories. Over the past few years, Barry Hannah's name kept popping up next to the names of several authors whose prose styles I love, with everyone calling him things like "the most thrilling, vital stylist in American fiction." When his collected stories were published (unfortunately on the occasion of his death), I snatched up the book.

I was disappointed. While it's true that Hannah can write sentences that are funny, insightful, surprising, and entertaining, very few of the stories worked for me. I paid attention to the prose, but lost the thread of the story.

My favorite stories were "Testimony of a Pilot," "Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?", and "The Evening of the Yarp."  My favorite sentence came from the early story "Love Too Long":

I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out.

(What a surprising world! Four stars for Keith Richard's autobiography and two and a half for "the best fiction writer to appear in the south since Flannery O'Conner"!)