I’d Rather Be Reading Airships

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At The Millions, Darcey Steinke gives an elegy for her Southern hero, Barry Hannah. She recalls their first interaction—when he called her to say a New Yorker review of her first novel had made him angry—and the relationship that followed. Most importantly, though, Steinke writes how Hannah offers a view of the South otherwise unexplored:

Hannah, on the other hand, hadn’t gotten the memo about the folksy-soft-glow south; instead he drove full throttle into the taboos of the messed up region, taking on the Jesus-obsessed nuts, the macho lunatics still hurting from the loss of the Civil War, the racial friction, and the lush almost mystical landscape.


Alex Norcia is a writer living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in VICE, The Millions, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Electric Literature, Word Riot, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is an editor-at-large at The Offing. More from this author →