A frisky mentor eager to bend teacher-student boundaries, John Cheever gave Allan Gurganus his first big break. Cheever got Allan's story Minor Heroism published in The New Yorker in November 1974 when he was 27. But Allan didn't publish a book until he was 42, the enormous hit Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. He followed it with an uneven collection of stories called White People, and, finally, a second novel in 1997, the all-gay Manhattan comic tragedy Plays Well with Others. A very fine quartet of novellas came in 2001, The Practical Heart
, but no books in the past twelve years. He's 66 today and will end the long draught in September with Local Souls, a
trio of novellas from a Norton affiliate Liveright, again returning to the fictional Falls of his native North Carolina:
- "Fear Not," a banker's daughter seeking the child she was forced to surrender when barely fifteen, only to find an adult rescuer she might have invented.
- "Saints Have Mothers," a beloved high school valedictorian disappears during a trip to Africa, granting her ambitious mother a postponed fame that turns against her.
- "Decoy," the doctor-patient friendship between two married men breaks toward desire just as a biblical flood shatters their neighborhood and rearranges their fates.
The new book has been blurbed by T.C. Boyle, Ann Patchett, John Irving, Wells Tower, and Amy Hempel, all of whom echo Ed White in praising his language: “Allan Gurganus is our verbal magician. He turns factual rabbits into poetic doves. Every sentence contains a surprise, but the brilliant surface doesn’t dazzle us from peering into the tender human depths.”
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