These few words encircle all there is of Happiness.

Turn to face those recent angels nearest you.

Let your saved hands join others’. Touch new/old faces, old/new genitals.

Eleven words—through Magna past Timbre toward Imbue—are burned deep within our Gate’s colossal crystal. Heaven’s motto lights you toward your vertical future. Finally, encircled, we conclude commencing.

The Celestial offers you perfect, funny, erotic company, eternally.

This is Paradise.

This, my dears, is all God ever promised us:

HELLO AT LAST.
YOU HAVE ONLY
JUST BEGUN TO
KNOW EACH OTHER.

ALLAN GURGANUS

Allan Gurganus lives in a small town in North Carolina. His honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

ALSO BY ALLAN GURGANUS

OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL

Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and Colonel William Marsden was fifty. If he was a “veteran of the War for Southern Independence,” Lucy became a “veteran of the veteran” with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy’s story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator’s daily battles in the Home—complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72663-7

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

With great narrative inventiveness and emotional amplitude, Allan Gurganus gives us artistic Manhattan in the wild 1980s, where young artists—refugees from the middle class—hurl themselves into playful work and serious fun. Our guide is Hartley Mims Jr., a Southerner whose native knack for happiness might thwart his literary ambitions. Through his eyes we encounter the composer Robert Christian Gustafson, an Iowa preacher’s son whose good-looks constitute both a mythic draw and a major limitation, and Angelina “Alabama” Byrnes, a failed deb, five feet tall but bristling with outsized talent. These friends shelter each other, promote each other’s work, and compete erotically. When tragedy strikes, this trio grows up fast, somehow founding, at the worst of times, the truest sort of family.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70203-7

THE PRACTICAL HEART