From a celebrated master of the Southern Gothic comes a last collection of hard-hitting short fiction, his final posthumous work

Beloved for his novels Twilight, The Long Home, and The Lost Country and his groundbreaking collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, William Gay returns with one final posthumous collection of short stories, adapted from the archive found after his death in February 2012. In addition to previously unpublished short stories, Stories from the Attic includes fragments from two of the unpublished novels that were works in progress at the time of his death.

Marked by his signature skill and bare-knuckled insight, this collection is a must-read for William Gay devotees and fans of Southern short fiction.

A posthumous collection of short stories and fragments from novels unfinished at the time of his death. This collection shows, once again, that Gay was a master of Southern Gothic, with tales that are dark and atmospheric and written with finely crafted prose.

Praise for William Gay

"Gay’s great abilities in character building, richness of language and storytelling are on full display.” -Charles Frazier, author of Varina

“William Gay is richly gifted: a seemingly effortless storyteller…a writer of prose that’s fiercely wrought, pungent in detail yet poetic in the most welcome sense.” —The New York Times Book Review

"Gay’s style was fully formed: sinister and lovely, dark and atmospheric, blood-soaked and word-drunk. He fit squarely in the Southern Gothic tradition, but the languid, unrolling richness of his language made the stories and novels that followed feel fresh, a rebirth of a genre prone to pale imitations." -Wall Street Journal

"The pleasure that Gay, a self-educated Vietnam veteran, takes from language is frequently a thing of beauty...A Dickensian feel for character makes his stories surge with life while the sharp dialogue is furious, funny and very southern. ....Gay, an instinctive original, had the spark of natural genius." -The Irish Times

"William Gay could write a grocery list and make it sing and burn off the pages in equal measure." -Heavy Feather Review

"William Gay is a flat-out monster." -Parnassus Recommended Reads


“A writer of striking talent.” —Chicago Tribune


“Writers like Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner would welcome Gay as their peer for getting characters so entangled in the roots of a family tree.” —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)