In his fictional town of Falls, North Carolina—a watchful zone of stifling mores—Allan Gurganus’s fond and comical characters risk everything to protect their improbable hopes from prejudice, poverty, and betrayal. Muriel Fraser, a poor Scottish-born spinster, is the subject of a John Singer Sargent portrait in the imagination of her devoted great-nephew. Tad Worth, a young man dying of AIDS, finds ways to restore vitality to old friends and eighteenth-century houses. Overnight, one pillar of the community, accused of child molesting, becomes the village pariah. And Clyde Delman, ugliest if kindest man in Falls, finds the love of his eight-year-old son jeopardized when troubling family secrets arise. In each of these splendid complex tales, Allan Gurganus wrings truths—sometimes bruising, ofttimes warming—from human hearts as immense as they are local.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72763-4

WHITE PEOPLE

In these eleven stories, Allan Gurganus gives heartbreaking and hilarious voice to the fears, desires and triumphs of a grand cast of Americans. Here are war heroes bewildered by the complex negotiations of family life, former debutantes called upon to muster resources they never knew they had, senior citizens startled by their own bravery, and married men brought up short by the marvelous possibilities of entirely different lives. Written with flair, wit, and deep humanity, this award-winning volume confirms Allan Gurganus as one of the finest writers of our time.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70427-7

Copyright

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, FEBRUARY 1999

Copyright © 1997 by Allan Gurganus

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1997.

Portions of this work appeared, in slightly different form, in GQ and The New Yorker.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Gurganus, Allan.
Plays well with others / Allan Gurganus.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76413-3
Title.
PS3557.U814P57   1997
813’.54-dc21    97-36884

Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger

v3.0