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, September 2002

Copyright © 2001 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 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The novella The Practical Heart was first published as a chapbook by the North Carolina Wesleyan College Press in a signed edition of 1,000 copies. Harper’s magazine presented Section One as a folio in 1993. The Jewish Museum featured Section One in its catalog John Singer Sargent, Portraits of the Wertheimer Family in 2001.
Preservation News appeared in Conjunctions and in Preservation, the magazine of the National Trust. It was subsequently reprinted in Best American Gay Fiction (Little, Brown, and Co., 1998).
He’s One, Too, commissioned by Patrick Merla for his 1996 anthology, Boys Like Us, was later published in Granta.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Gurganus, Allan [date]
The practical heart : four novellas / Allan Gurganus.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Contents: The practical heart—Preservation news—
He’s one, too—Saint monster.
1. United States—Social life and customs—
20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.U814 P73 2001
813′.54—dc21  2001032665

eISBN: 978-0-307-76414-0

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