Classic short stories by a beloved virtuoso of language, craft, and madness from the American South

In the eight stories collected in Captain Maximus, Barry Hannah explores the lives of everymen and eccentrics alike in a showcase of his acerbic wit, dark humor, and stylistic flare. Hannah's unorthodox prose, characterized by unusual wordplay mixed with hints of Faulkner and Hemingway, captured the post-1970s malaise of American life, endeared him to literary circles, and left a lasting influence on the craft of countless authors. Featuring some of Hannah's finest work, from the fever dream "Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter" to his film treatment for Robert Altman "Power and Light," Captain Maximus is the perfect introduction to Barry Hannah.

"His writing was anarchic and wonderfully funny. He sounded like what you'd get if you stirred three heaping teaspoons of Thomas Pynchon and Terry Southern into a jar of Eudora Welty."-Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Barry Hannah (1942-2010) was the author of twelve books, and the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Achievement Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. A longtime writing instructor who taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Sewanee, he was the director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi where his students included Larry Brown and Donna Tartt.

Sam Lipsyte (foreword) is the author of the story collections Venus Drive and The Fun Parts and the novels: No One Left to Come Looking for You, Hark, The Ask (a New York Times Notable Book), The Subject Steve, and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Believer Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, he teaches at Columbia University.