Yonder Stands Your Orphan

"A wildly colorful, darkly comic, and ultimately sinister tale of madness and murder" from the award-winning master of Southern fiction (
Library Journal)
.
"Set in a lake community in the vicinity of Vicksburg, Miss., the story revolves around a fellow named Man Mortimer, a thief, pimp and murderer-and those are his good qualities-who physically resembles the late country singer Conway Twitty. On his trail are Byron Egan, a somewhat reformed biker-turned-preacher and prophet, and Max Raymond, a former doctor who plays saxophone in a bar band and has an attractive Cuban wife who sings, sometimes for the band, sometimes nude in her backyard. Meanwhile, the young town sheriff, distrusted since he hails from the North, manages to shock even the most degenerate denizens of the area with his affair with a luscious 72-year-old widow. The plot is kaleidoscopic, with flashes and slashes of wonder, humor and the macabre expertly mixed...Reading today's fiction is too often like eating stale bread. With Hannah, just imagine your most mouthwatering meal, take a double helping and you've come close to the pleasure of reading this book."-
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Maddeningly brilliant...a stunning assemblage of characters: ruffians, high rollers, heartbroken lushes, prostitutes, bikers-turned-preachers, dead ringers, drug addicts, third-rate porn stars, lounge lizards...They do not so much interact as collide, like atomic particles in a cyclotron."-
The Hartford Courant
"An electrifying prose style, memorable characters, plot lines laced with violence and absurdity, and humor as black as an Ace comb...an expert navigator of the back roads of the human heart."-
The Denver Post
"Like moonshine whisky, [Hannah's fiction] packs quite a wallop."-
The Wall Street Journal

Barry Hannah (1942-2010) was the author of twelve books:
Geronimo Rex,
Airships,
Ray,
The Tennis Handsome,
Nightwatchmen,
Captain Maximus,
Hey Jack!,
Boomerang,
Never Die,
Bats Out of Hell,
High Lonesome, and
Yonder Stands Your Orphan. His work was published in
The New Yorker,
Esquire,
Harper's Magazine,
The Southern Review,
The Oxford American,
Gulf Coast Review, and many other magazines. His achievements in fiction have been honored with an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and he was nominated for the American Book Award for
Ray and the National Book Award for
Geronimo Rex, which won the William Faulkner Prize. He has also received the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award for Airships, and his body of work has been recognized with the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction. Hannah was director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford for three decades, and also taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Sewanee and Bennington summer writing seminars, and held teaching appointments at many other colleges and universities.