Padgett Powell: 11 books

Padgett Powell, author of the acclaimed The Interrogative Mood and “one of the few truly important American writers of our time” (Sam Lipsyte), returns with a hilarious Southern send-up of Samuel Beckett’s classic Waiting for Godot. Truly a master of envelope-pushing, post-postmodern...

The idiosyncratic genius of Padgett Powell shines through in nine stories that bend the conventions of short fiction Padgett Powell’s literary stage is a blurred vision of the American South. His characters are bored, sad, assured, confused, deluded, and often just one step away from madness....

Named a Best Book of 2015 by NPR and Vanity Fair "Rifles through fear, identity, meaning, and cultural memory in forty-four short, surreal stories." -*Vanity Fair* "By turns moving, funny, and maddening…. very much in the key of Donald Barthelme." -The New York Times Book Review "Somehow...

Twenty-three surreal fictions—stories, character assassinations, and mini-travelogues—from one of the most heralded writers of the American South There are many things that repulse “Dr. Ordinary.” “Kansas” is notable for its distinct lack of farmland. “Wayne’s Fate” is most...

In the sequel to Powell’s acclaimed debut, Edisto, Simons Manigault is older—if not particularly wiser—and searching for the cure to his restlessness in memory, travel, and forbidden love Fourteen years after we first met Simons Manigault, our protagonist is newly graduated from Clemson...

**A special two-in-one edition of National Book Award finalist Padgett Powell’s acclaimed southern novels: Edisto and Edisto Revisited In Edisto, Simons Everson Manigault is not a typical twelve-year-old boy in tiny Edisto, South Carolina**,** in the late 1960s. At the insistence of...

Finalist for the National Book Award: Through the eyes of a precocious twelve-year-old in a seaside South Carolina town, the world of love, sex, friendship, and betrayal blossoms Simons Everson Manigault is not a typical twelve-year-old boy in tiny Edisto, South Carolina**,** in the late 1960s....

“If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel (and maybe they did. Did they?) it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell’s.” —Richard Ford The Interrogative Mood is a wildly inventive, jazzy meditation on life and language by the novelist that Ian...

A housewife revels in the secret world of her mind filled with historical characters and twisted love stories in this inventive sendup of Southern fiction. Mrs. Hollingsworth sits at her kitchen table, compiling her grocery list. The subject of the list is not foodstuffs, but memories that...

Hailed by Time as an “extravagantly comic” novel, A Woman Named Drown is a wild and strange journey through America’s South that follows a young PhD dropout who falls in with an amateur actress–cum-pool shark On the brink of earning his doctorate in chemistry, the unnamed narrator decides...

The social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of people come from? Combining biochemical insights about the origin of life with innovative and historically...