A critically acclaimed debut novel first published in 1980, Aransas recounts a young man’s attempt to find his place in the world as he navigates the moral dilemma of training an “exquisitely conscious being” to perform in a seaside dolphin circus.
A resonant first novel. Beneath its genial surface, allusive undercurrents tug.
The sureness and poise of this first novel are as remarkable as the sharpness, oddity, and clarity of its feelings . . . Aransas is an elegant debut.
Harrigan’s eye for locale and its effect is superb.
Harrigan . . . has a sharp eye for observing man, beast, seashore, and town in a vividly drawn setting.
An ardent and elegant book, beautiful in its language, mature in its perceptions, noble in its sentiments.
A sensitive, enormously evocative first novel in a spare but warm prose style that immerses us in atmosphere as insistently as it does the plot . . . Harrigan is a splendid novelist.
Aransas has several surprises, including dramatic suspense, counterculture revisionism, and what must be considered dolphin revisionism. More, Harrigan has written an acute American regional novel.
Stephen Harrigan is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including the award-winning novels The Gates of the Alamo and Remember Ben Clayton, the critically acclaimed essay collection The Eye of the Mammoth, and Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly and a faculty fellow at the University of Texas’s Michener Center for Writers.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- Afterword
