Captain Maximus

by Barry Hannah

8 short stories featuring this unusual author's "... hard drinkers, passionate lovers, good haters, living on the edge, hurling fury at a complacent world."

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature

101 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Barry Hannah was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi. He was the author of eight novels and five short story collections. He worked with notable American editors and publishers such as Gordon Lish, Seymour Lawrence, and Morgan Entrekin. His work was published in Esquire, The New Yorker, The Oxford American, The Southern Review, and a host of American magazines and quarterlies. In his lifetime he was awarded the The Faulkner Prize (1972), The Bellaman Foundation Award in Fiction, The Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award, the PEN/Malamud Award (2003) and the Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, where he taught creative writing for 28 years. He died on March 1, 2010, of natural causes.

Reviews

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[McCarthy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I absolutely loved Airships. I've read it cover to cover maybe three times. I've read the stories Testimony of Pilot and Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa maybe a dozen times each. I wanted to love Captain Maximus, I really did, but it felt like it was comprised of a couple of stories Gordon Lish cut from Airships and some yarns Hannah would tell his drinking buddies. The quality of stories in Airships was pretty uneven, a few of the twenty stories were duds, but then there are a handful of masterpieces. When Hannah is on, he's really on. None of the stories in Maximus hold a candle to the good stories in Airships. If Maximus wasn't written by Hannah, I would have quit reading after the first two or three stories.
Every once in a while you catch a glimpse of Hannah's genius in a very well crafted sentence, but overall, this collection was a disappointment.

[Lane Wilkinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

With his playfully blunt prose, Hannah (who passed away March 1, 2010) reads like the strange child of Richard Brautigan and Cormac McCarthy.

[Jack Kelley]

have been wanting to read hannah for a few years now and finally got the opportunity as the last time i was at vassar i found this book for free in an old office.

this was pretty excellent, even if one or two of the stories are duds. was surprised to see all the negativity on the reviews for this one, but the consensus seems to be that this as a lesser hannah, which makes me excited to try something else.

"idaho" and "even greenland" are the stars here, imo. a lot works really well here on the level of the sentence. pretty amazed to see how upstream this is of a lot of middle-brow 90s and 00s culture, most prominently twin peaks and silver jews.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a writerly text; Barthes would have loved a book like this. "Idaho" seems to be mostly a personal essay. The prose in many of these stories is closer to poetry; language at play without much effort to tell a story. In fact, most of these untell a story. "Even Greenland" didn't work for me because of the artificial dialog between the pilots. I didn’t need it to be realistic. I could have gone with quirky, but this dialog seemed designed to deliberately knock me out of the story, Barthelme (Donald) style. "Power and Light" seemed like a satire of a European art film. I couldn't take this seriously as a "film idea" because it was way overwritten for a film treatment. Too much poetry and too much novelistic technique. Great imagistic writing, however—quite unlike his usual style.

[Rayroy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard to believe this the same author as Airships.
Not everything a great writer wrote was great, this is proof.
Take away the bad stories and there are only 3 stories worth reading.
Wish I didn't buy this one.
Still searching for a copy of Airships whenever I am at a used book store.
Should have picked up Ray, as that title was on the shelves.
Every used book store has countless copies of Snow Falling on Cedars, Spartina and Eat Pray Love.
It's rare to find Captian Maximus.
Just wish the experience after the find was worth the ten dollars
It was not.
Tennis and motorcycles anyone?

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only a couple of the short stories did I really enjoy. I got this sneaky suspicion that it might have been one of those "we need something" requests from publisher, and this is what Hannah was able to cobble from his files. Some of the stories felt as if they were scribblings toward something larger.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Ah, heart pie!"

[Brandon Merkley · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like 3.5 stars, imo.

[David Olsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange and wonderful writer. I found a signed copy of this book in a little bookstore in the mountains. I am glad I did.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my favorite short story collection, though a couple were good. Which, I suppose, ain't so bad, considering that there are only seven stories in this slim volume. That said, Hannah's prose can be jarring to some, as he definitely had an idiosyncratic, fuck-the-rules style. And when he's on, he's on, though most of the stories here did not fall into that category. Like Richard Brautigan, Hannah can captivate you, but he can also piss you off by parading his verbal hijinx as a "deeper" form of art, when in reality it's mostly self-serving, incomplete bullshit. I hear that his other collection, Airships, is quite good. This wasn't.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barry Hannah, Captain Maximus (Penguin, 1985)

Barry Hannah is America's most sadly neglected literary author since John Fante, and that's a shame. Hannah's place in literary history should be carved in rock, if for no other reason than having written one of the world's few absolutely perfect novels in The Tennis Handsome; had he retired after that, he should have been able to retire secure in the fact that his literary legacy would stand as long as humanity does. But he kept writing, and every once in a while he'd turn out another wonderful and overlooked gem. The short story collection Captain Maximus is without doubt one of them.

Hannah hands us a small (too small, for my tastes, but you can't have everything; it runs ninety-two pages in trade paperback) collection of stories, many of which had only appeared in limited runs or places one normally doesn't find short stories (for example, the newspaper) before appearing here. Spanning the first half of the eighties, the collection shows once again why Barry Hannah should be hoisted on the shoulders of the literary establishment to tapdance on the heads of vacuous New York Times bestseller list residents; his characters are savage, unrepentant, funny, mixed-up, and above all fiercely intelligent and with a finely-honed sense of the ironies of their existences. Most of the stories here are only a few pages long, but still manage to pack a wallop. As a side note, this is unmistakably work of that genre known as "southern fiction;" had a genetic engineer taken the best parts of the creative genes of Flannery O'Connor and mated them with the same from Faulkner, they might have gotten Barry Hannah (or, at least, the oddly fraternal twins of Hannah and Ferrol Sams). So let your taste for whatever it is that makes "southern fiction" southern be your guide, but one way or the other, give Hannah a try. If you want a small dose first, by all means, start here.

(Side note: it is amusing that 90% of the bibliographies of Hannah I found on the web list Captain Maximus as a novel. Ah, the hazards of letting books go out of print for years.) *** ½

[Bill Householder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ladies and Gentlemen,
An interesting collection of stories, some real, some not, (well, “Idaho” is probably the only real story); most of these stories are somewhat fragmented, as though they were belonging to a greater whole--maybe I’m expecting another Tennis Handsome. The film treatment, “Power and Light,” written for Altman would’ve made a good Altman film and isn’t a bad read in its own right. All in all, I liked it.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

all over the place-- "power and light" didn't do much for me, and it makes up more than a third of the book. but the five stories preceding it are on maybe not as good as the stuff in airships, but darn close, and all have knockout lines tossed off. still trying to figure out what Barry Hannah is trying to tell me about race.

[Doc]

This was my bathroom reading for the last few days. Some oddly eccentric stories.

[Ben Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This guy gets it! "Even Greenland"!!!!!!!!!!! AMAZING!!!!!!

[Robb Todd]

It's been a couple years since I read this book and I don't remember anything about it.