Airships

Let's just get going with some of the sentences: "Undressed, Levaster seemed more like a mutinous gland than a whole male figure." "The few hairs he had left were oily and carefully set in a dramatic way." "I was sweeping the front steps when my leg, the one that was burned, went through the top step and I was up to my hip in my porch." The legend of Barry Hannah and his sentences—overful, lewd, desperate, and yet precise and even delicate, and certainly, for better or worse, Southern—rests not entirely but substantially on the stories in Airships, in which desire seems to be a mutinous gland of its own. As a Confederate soldier laments after he breaks the neck of an enemy, "Oh, life, life—you kill what you love."