Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including Edisto (1983), which was nominated for the National Book Award, and two collections of stories. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and the Paris Review, as well as in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Sports Writing. He has received the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.
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EdistoA Novel
The important thing, I suppose, is that this weekend was the first one we spent that wasn’t entirely at the state fair or big-brother Disneyland. It was the first time Daddy sort of ignored me like the Doctor, and I must confess that I had a better time than ever before on these custody junkets. It’s heavy pressure, you know, to find your role four days out of the month, a little two-day run every two weeks with no rehearsal. I suppose it was no fun for him, either, being the director as well as actor and still not getting it right. But that weekend he seemed a lot more regular in a way it’s hard to describe. I think that woman (Mike’s mother) looked sexy, for one thing, but that is strictly my unhaired opinion. At school the word is, you don’t know what girls really are until you have hair, kind of a Samson thing, I guess.
Edisto:A Novel -
EdistoA Novel
Well, on this gunky straw Diane pulled her pants down and we looked for about five seconds. Then she was headed back up the trail fast, leaving us with the mystery. Before we could begin to work on it, we saw the bus and started running too—again very subtle, all of us running after Diane Parker out of the woods. She made $1.25. I had this feeling sort of like I needed to pee when I saw her naked. This was aggravated during the run to the bus, but subsided. I could find out what this was if I pored over the literature, but I frankly didn’t care to.
Edisto:A Novel -
EdistoA Novel
So imagine the impact of my falling out of a bus, suspected of smoking modern hemp with Negro kids, and my taking up with a process server nobody knows a thing about but Theenie, who swears he’s the evil incarnation of her lost heroin grandbaby out of her bad-jazz-singer crazyass daughter. Imagine that. And I think all that carrying on on my part necessitated some immediate investment consultations, changed the curve of custody junkets, invigorated faculty parties, sweetened my last hours at Jake’s Baby Grand, for I knew a chapter was closing, and imperiled, of course, my friendship with the process server I got to even name like he was a character in those novels I was supposed to write.
Edisto:A Novel
“ . . . Hilarious, bizarre and absorbing . . . Echoes of everyone from Walt Whitman to Will Rogers, vaudeville to Wittgenstein . . . Powell can make the most barbed issues—the power of media, class resentment, private self-judgment and dread of death—slither through dialogue of zany simplicity.” —The San Francisco Chronicle [on You & Me]
“A remarkable collection of philosophical inquiries, stimulating either/ors and good-faith measures the gap between where we are as a species and where we belong. The Interrogative Mood demands to be read deliberately, for it is courageous and entertaining and interested in the essential mysteries of self and society.” —The New York Times Book Review
"A remarkable book . . . there is not a line that simply slides by; each, in one way or another, turns things to a fresh and unexpected angle. There are splendid things said." —Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review [on Edisto]
Selected Works
