Padgett Powell

Huckleberry Finn, the best friend of Tom Sawyer, is a young boy in the 1840s, who runs away from home, and floats down the Mississippi River. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective). It is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi...

The acclaimed writer Padgett Powell is fascinated by what it feels like to walk through everyday life, to hear the swing and snap of American talk, to be both electrified and overwhelmed by the mad cacophony -- the "muchness"--Of America. "The Interrogative Mood" is Powell's playful and profound response, a bebop solo of a book in which every sentence is a question.

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 his challenging mother, who believes her son to possess a capacity for genius, Simons immerses himself in great literature and becomes as literate and literary as any English...

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 to chuck it all away in favor of real life. So begins an odd pilgrimage through the American South. In Tennessee, our hero is bewitched by an older, gin-swilling,...

A phantasmagoric dream of a novel, exploring the mind of a housewife enamored of historical personages, twisted love stories, and strange conspiracies Mrs. Hollingsworth sits at her kitchen table, compiling her grocery list. The subject of the list is not foodstuffs, but memories that never happened, inventions of loves, and strange conspiracies peopled by men who appear in the lonely housewife's head-men infinitely more real to her than her own husband....

Presents a collection of short stories that cover the topics of longing, fear, work, loneliness, and cultural nostalgia.

Gathering pieces written during the past three decades, Indigo ranges widely in subject matter and tone, opening with "Cleve Dean," which takes Padgett Powell to Sweden for the World Armwrestling Federation Championships, through to its closing title piece, which charts Powell's lifelong fascination with the endangered indigo snake, "a thinking snake," and his obsession with seeing one in the wild. "Some things in between" include an autobiographical...