The Sharpshooter Blues: A Novel

by Lewis Nordan

ALA Notable Book; Mississippi Arts and Letters Fiction Award. Lewis Nordan's remarkable third novel, THE SHARPSHOOTER BLUES, is in part a meditation on America's love affair with blue-steel barrels and soft-tip bullets, and in part a look at the violence and loss that ensue when the guns come out to play one day in a small town. Just as his award-winning WOF WHISTLE illuminated the complexity of racism, Nordan's new novel shines the brilliant flash of gunfire on love--between fathers and sons, between husbands and wives, between gay lovers, and between friends. At its heart is Hydro Raney, a boy who's never grown up, a boy who wouldn't hurt a soul. In THE SHARPSHOOTER BLUES, Nordan once again makes us laugh; then our helpless laughter turns first into weeping and then into wonder. A comedy at least half as divine--and dark--as Dante's own . . . a flat-out tour de force.--Lee K. Abbott, Miami Herald; This is not just a good book, this is a marvelous book.-The Village Voice.

• ISBN10: 1565120833
• ISBN13: 9781565120839
• Publish Date: 10 January 1995
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 30 September 2022
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Workman Publishing
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 291
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

A mad, mad world, one that Nordan creates in the same lightning storm as Wolf Whistle. Again, nothing about this should work, and again, so help me, it does. It’s good and evil, it’s love and tragedy, it’s madness and grace. “It might just be a story,” as the sweet, doomed Hydro muses, “like so much else in the world.”

But, in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, as everywhere: “As long as there was a story, that’s all that really mattered.”

Hydro fell in love with the sharpshooter. He didn’t love him as much as he loved his daddy, who shot the refrigerator for love and a memory of the heart; and Hydro’s bones didn’t ache for him the way they ached for his mama, who he never knew, a long time gone; and he didn’t even love him as much as he loved Louis, the strange child who shared Wonder Woman and Green Hornet— but you couldn’t watch anything as beautiful as two melons busting open and slick seeds blowing out into a sugarcane field without falling in love.