I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down $300.00
New York, NY: Free Press (2002)
Near fine in dust jacket.
William Gay firmly 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 critically acclaimed follow-up, Provinces of Night. Like Faulkner’s Mississippi and Cormac McCarthy’s American West, Gay’s Tennessee is redolent of broken, colorful souls hard at work charting the pathos of their interior lives.
His debut collection, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, brings together what Gay’s dedicated readers are eager for and what new readers will find the perfect introduction to his world: thirteen stories that are mined from this same fertile soil teeming with the grizzled, everyday folk that Gay is famous for bringing to life.
In these pages readers meet old man Meecham, who escapes from his new 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, is faced with an inescapable end when he abandons her; Finis and Doneita Beasley, whose forty-year marriage is broken up by a dead dog; Bobby Pettijohn, who is awakened in the middle of the night by the noise and lights of a search party looking for clues after a body is discovered in his backwoods.
William Gay expertly sets these conflicted people who make bad choices in life and love against lush back-country scenery, and somehow manages to defy moral logic as we grow to love his characters for the weight of their human errors. Diverse as these tales are, what connects them is the powerful voice of a born storyteller.
Provinces of Night $300.00
New York, NY: Doubleday (2000)
Near fine in decorated wrappers.
The Paperhanger, the Doctor’s Wife, and the Child Who Went Into the Abstract $250.00
Hohenwald, TN: Booksource (1999)
One of 250 numbered copies signed by the author.  “The Paperhanger” story is the  first in the Oxford Series. This chapbook, in saddle-stitched decorated wrappers, is in fine condition.
Come Home, Come, It’s Suppertime $250.00
Hohenwald, TN: Booksource (2000)
One of 500 numbered copies signed by the author. Â “Come Home” is the second in the Oxford Series. This chapbook, in saddle-stitched decorated wrappers, is in fine condition.
Twilight $175.00
San Francisco, CA: MacAdam Cage (2006)
Near fine in dust jacket.
A Southern gothic novel about an undertaker who won’t let the dead rest.
Suspecting that something is amiss with their father’s burial, teenager Kenneth Tyler and his sister Corrie venture to his gravesite and make a horrific discovery: their father, a whiskey bootlegger, was not actually buried in the casket they bought for him. Worse, they learn that the undertaker, Fenton Breece, has been grotesquely manipulating the dead.
Armed with incriminating photographs, Tyler becomes obsessed with bringing the perverse undertaker to justice. But first, he must outrun Granville Sutter, a local strongman and convicted murderer hired by Fenton to destroy the evidence. What follows is an adventure through the Harrikin, an eerie backwoods filled with tangled roads, rusted machinery, and eccentric squatters-old men, witches, and families among them-who both shield and imperil Tyler as he runs for safety.
With his poetic, haunting prose, William Gay rewrites the rules of the gothic fairy tale while exploring the classic Southern themes of good and evil.
Long Home $150.00
Denver, CO: MacMurray & Beck (1999)
Near fine in dust jacket.
In a literary voice that is both original and powerfully unsettling, William Gay tells the story of Nathan Winer, a young and headstrong Tennessee carpenter who lost his father years ago to a human evil that is greater and closer at hand than any the boy can imagine — until he learns of it first-hand.
Provinces of Night $150.00
New York, NY: Doubleday (2000)
Near fine in dust jacket.
It’s 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he’s been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won’t be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he’s an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.’s grandson, is pleased with the old man’s homecoming, but Fleming’s life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.
In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption–a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.