* Description
* "Gay's great abilities in character building, richness of language and storytelling are on full display in this
posthumous novel."
--Charles Frazier, National Book Award-winning author of Varina
"The pleasure that Gay, a self-educated Vietnam veteran, takes from language is frequently a thing of beauty....Gay, an
instinctive original, had the spark of natural genius."
--The Irish Times
"If you fancy a blast of full-on Americana, it's hard to think of anything published recently that blasts in such a
brilliantly sustained way--or that makes much of contemporary fiction suddenly seem so bloodless by comparison."
--The Times
"Gay's style was fully formed: sinister and lovely, dark and atmospheric, blood-soaked and word-drunk. He fit squarely
in the Southern Gothic tradition, but the languid, unrolling richness of his language made the stories and novels that
followed feel fresh, a rebirth of a genre prone to pale imitations."
--Wall Street Journal
"An eerie, stream-of-consciousness drift through storms, death, and mystery in midcentury Tennessee."
--Garden &
"There is so much to be awed by in Gay's new novel and it only makes us miss him all the more, though it is a
less-than-subtle reminder of how lucky we are to have had him share his talent with us while he was here. William Gay
could write a grocery list and make it sing and burn off the pages in equal measure, and The Lost Country is yet another
testament to his undeniable virtuosity with the written word."
--Heavy Feather Review
"William Gay is a flat-out monster. The former prot�g� of Cormac McCarthy is back from dead, ... preoccupied with a
twisted, subversive, yet elegiac representation of a South that takes no heed of where it's been nor where it's going.
Get ready for a ride."
--Parnassus Recommended Reads
"A haunting and visceral rendering of the American south."
--The Literary Review
"That Gay was a master storyteller is not news. This book is proof of it. A superb slice of Americana dripped in noir
and packed with the kind of gutter poetry that sticks to your ribs way after the last page has been turned, this is one
of those gems that will be discussed for years as being part of the new American classics."
--LitReactor
"A lyrical ballad dedicated to the denizens of Tennessee...The Lost Country may be considered an Americana classic."
--Entropy
"One of the masters of Southern Gothic delivers another story full of colourfully downtrodden characters,
McCarthy-esque prose and whip-poor-wills."
--Various Small Flames
"Gay's midcentury Tennessee is a realm of bad weather and small-town lowlifes, vagrancy laws, and bootleg liquor; every
man is a drunk, alternately listless and lustful and violent; every woman is defined by the use she makes (or once made,
or will make) of her body. Yet there is humor in this bleakness, and it bubbles up from the same human springs as the
cruelty and violence. ... Infidelities, prison breaks, murderous revenge, biblical language, and a deep kinship between
the land and its inhabitants--Gay's novel is full-on Southern gothic and will delight fans of the genre."
--Kirkus Reviews
"William Gay's The Lost Country lands like a shimmering gift from the beyond. For those of us who cherish and honor
Gay's tremendous talent, his bold method of seeing the waste and wonder we are, this posthumous novel is a reminder of
what we miss: the language pitched toward the sublime, his men and women grappling for redemption in a world that has
damned them, his understanding of grace in the presence of human badness. When Gay died too soon, we lost much, but The
Lost Country gives a piece of him back to us."
-- William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark
"Like so many fans of William Gay's work I've been waiting to read this seemingly mythical work, The Lost Country, for
a quite some time. I still remember the feeling of admiration and awe I got when I read an early copy of his first
novel, The Long Home, back in the late nineties and reading this new or lost novel you might call it gave me exactly the
same feeling. Gay's elegiac prose sings once again as he breathes life into his characters and mines his patch of soil
with the skill of the old masters. The Lost Country is the story of Billy Edgewater and his hard journey through a post
World War II South filled with the downtrodden - hucksters, racists, drunks, bad or lost men and women all trying to
make it in a harsh rural setting that is unforgiving yet beautiful. It's a helluva good ride and I can't wait to
recommend it to readers."
--Cody Morrison, Square Books
"The novel exposes us to a deliciously dark southern underbelly, one that, when paired with its sparse, lean prose and
quiet intensity, becomes incredibly mesmerizing."
--The Next Best Book Club
Number of Pages: 368
Genre: Fiction + Literature Genres
Sub-Genre: Literary
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Author: William Gay
Language: English
Estimated shipping dimensions: 5.8INCH X 8.6INCH X 1.0INCH
DPCI : 248-61-3559
UPC : 9781945814525
TCIN : 53327693
Estimated shippimg weight: 1.15POUND