Local Souls - Softcover

Alan Gurganus's, books include White People and Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Gurganus is a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Adaptations of his fiction have earned four Emmys. A resident of his native North Carolina, he lives in a village of six thousand souls.

“Refreshing. . . . an antidote to the marketplace’s mass message and massage. . . . The house of a master-magician-builder-writer. . . . Go ahead, step in, light up your life.”
- Clyde Edgerton, Garden & Gun

“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.”
- Edmund White

“Allan Gurganus has the uncanny ability to make you laugh and shudder at the same time. That rare gift is on full and glorious display here.”
- T. C. Boyle

“Vivid language, provocative sentence structure, and metaphors that elevate the reader’s consciousness. [Gurganus] shares with his southern cohorts a delight in discovering the quotidian within lives led under extraordinary, even bizarre circumstances.”
- Booklist

“Gurganus returns to Falls, N.C., the setting of his Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, with this trio of linked novellas.... In these layered, often funny narratives, close reading is rewarded as Gurganus exposes humanity as a strange species.”
- Publishers Weekly, "Pick of the Week"

“Each novella in Local Souls...is guided by the centrifugal force of memory, heart and a playful, agile mind...Let these novellas bring attention to the overlooked art form. They will please readers who have been waiting for more from an admired writer who is funny, appropriately dark and can magically twirl a sentence.”
- Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune, Editor's Choice

“The pleasures of Allan Gurganus’ Local Souls are pretty much the pleasures of fiction, period: the satisfactions of the tale and the surprise of the phrase, insights into the human condition and portraits from a particular place, a sharp sense of the physical world and a freshened awareness of the pulls and pains of social class. Pick a page and you’ll find a sentence to love.... Dazzling.”
- Kevin Fenton, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“The beloved author whose literary bona fides rank him among the most revered writers of the last 50 years, Gurganus has an eye for gesture large and small, an ear for voice at once razor-sharp and tender, and a way with finding the absolutely precise moment of dramatic tension.”
- Brett Lott, Boston Globe