Yonder Stands Your Orphan (Books That Changed the World)

by Barry Hannah

[jamiereadthis]

I needed something batshit crazy and bighearted, and there’s nobody better for both than Barry Hannah. My favorite when reading him is to forget— just for a minute, just long enough— all the ongoing story and pick a line, any line, to marvel at the mini-story packed inside it.

“Lightning loved the swamp. The willows thrashed now where all the souls of dead bad poets roamed day and night.”

“Spanish words, Japanese thoughts, for these elves of Confederate trash.”

“Here was a man who in his bad, bad days had almost blown Roman over on a gravel road riding his giant Harley next to Roman’s little motorbike, loaded with fish. Now a Christian orator when he was not playing hooky from the Anonymous program.”

“Some things were sin and the others just math.”

A million stories for one, these screwy sentences that ring with drop-dead truth. You could pick a page blind, point and find one. Here. Page 181. “‘Nice,’ said Carl Bob Feeney, less insane than last week.”