I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down: Collected Stories

by William Gay

William Gay established himself as the big new name to include in the storied annals of Southern Lit (Esquire) with his debut novel, The Long Home, and his highly acclaimed follow-up, Provinces of Night. Like Faulkner's Mississippi and Cormac McCarthy's American West, Gay's Tennessee is redolent of broken souls. Mining that same fertile soil, his debut collection, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, brings together thirteen stories charting the pathos of interior lives. Among the colorful people readers meet are: old man Meecham, who escapes from his nursing home only to find his son has rented their homestead to white trash; Quincy Nell Qualls, who not only falls in love with the town lothario but, pregnant, faces an inescapable end when he abandons her; Finis and Doneita Beasley, whose forty-year marriage is broken up by a dead dog; and Bobby Pettijohn -- awakened in the night by a search party after a body is discovered in his back woods.
William Gay expertly sets these conflicted characters against lush backcountry scenery and defies our moral logic as we grow to love them for the weight of their human errors.

• ISBN10: 0743242920
• ISBN13: 9780743242929
• Publish Date: 1 October 2003 (first published 24 September 2002)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Simon & Schuster
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 303
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

I’ve realized why I rate books five stars. At least in the past couple years, since I stopped reading out of a sense of duty and started reading out of a sense of love. Five stars aren’t saved for some objective perfection (although they’re usually perfection for me). Five stars are for certain kind of story with guts and reverence. Five stars are for the stories I want to cut off the TV and shut off the phone and stay up all night to read. The kind of stories that are just damn good stories, that make me lean and listen, that make me grin ear-to-ear, that make me read again and again.

I think we used to sit around fires and tell these stories. I think sometimes, the lucky times, we still do. I think that’s all I ever look for in a book these days, the kinds of stories that belong with fires, that I want to hear again and again and again while they get like good whiskey with age.

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First reviewed, August 2012: Let’s see, five stars for every story... the math is too high. I loved this. Beyond love. Of course.

One of the best things I find about William Gay— something in common with Rick Bass, Cormac McCarthy, see a pattern developing here?— is that his men are old souls. Broken, hard-knocked, perceptive and wise and then you read that they’re 22, 24, 28. It’s such a pleasure, such a relief after other books treat those ages like babies. It makes me feel like there’s a part of the world where I fit after all.

Here: where I started to write a list of favorites but it was just every story. I loved that Bonedaddy either survived Quincy Nell to die by Scribner’s hand three stories later, or Bonedaddy is such the specter and legend that his death happened a hundred different times, a hundred different ways.