Fiction

The Visibility of Things Long Submerged

Winner of the 12th Annual BOA Short Fiction Prize: Dripping with Southern gothic flavors, The Visibility of Things Long Submerged gazes at the holy and the obscene while plumbing gritty secrets of the human heart.

With swamps, alligators, revival tents, faith healers, sex, death, guilt, sin and snakes, Looney leads us through a dark landscape brimming with the miraculous and the peculiar alike. A man from a fire shows up on someone's doorstep, covered in ash and barely alive. One man’s actions make an entire town question its own violence. A healer is bitten in half by an alligator as a crowd looks on.

Densely populated with characters that know intimately the trials of life and the restorative powers of love, these stories are filled with a deep longing for something beyond the restless disquiet.

Praise for The Visibility of Things Long Submerged

“With sorrow and hilarity (Who among us wouldn’t spend a Sunday morning at The Church of Jesus Christ Our Lover?), Looney’s chorus of saints, preachers, sinners, doubters, organists and acrobats, the damned and the saved, the bombastic and the fragile, their bodies ‘lost in their own flesh,’ their wetness ‘a kind of weeping,’ calls at us from these pages for nothing but love, love not for the sake of the voices themselves but as the one and only savior of humankind. The prose is heart-stopping, and if the sexual revolution hadn’t already happened, this splendid book might suffice.” —Abby Frucht, author of Maids and Fruit of the Month

“George Looney is a seismographer, an anthropologist, an excavator of hard truths. He has the spirit of a poet and the bravado of a born raconteur—his stories are lively, surprising, alternately whimsical and terrifying, anchored by the weight of his impeccably turned sentences. In these tales of faith healers and magicians, car crashes and questionable relics, he has captured the strange beauty of our world and the people we travel with, a perilous journey that he traces through the cracks in our hearts and the certainty of our bones, above ground and below.” —Tina May Hall, author of The Snow Collectors and The Physics of Imaginary Objects

“George Looney cannot hide his gift for poetry within his prose, these stories humming with imagery, language, and above all else, Looney’s romantic heart. Whether it’s a fallen preacher, an alien abductee, or a mourning lover, the characters in The Visibility of Things Long Submerged carry Looney’s purity, passion, and soul. This is a lovely collection, an important work by an author who has found so much beauty in our world, in all the least likely of places.” —Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze and I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories

“With one foot in religion and the other in the sacrilegious, George Looney’s superb collection is a study of the damage inflicted on us and that we live through and drag along with us. Eloquent and painful, these are hymns to what it means to have human failings and fierce desires in a world where the supernatural is sometimes more real than the real.” —Brian Evenson, author of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell and Altmann’s Tongue

FormatPaperback

Publication DateMay 23, 2023

ISBN9781950774944

$17.00

About the Author

George Looney is the author of three previous award-winning fiction collections—a novella, Hymn of Ash, a novel, Report from a Place of Burning, and a story collection, The Worst May Be Over—as well as thirteen collections of poetry, several of which won national awards. And he has edited the forthcoming posthumous book, The Ceremony of Opening the Mouth: The Poetry and Prose of Douglas Smith, to be published by Hermit Feathers Press of North Carolina. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Erie, where he founded a BFA in Creative Writing Program which he chaired for over ten years, and where he is Editor of the international literary journal Lake Effect. He also serves as Translation Editor of Mid-American Review, which he was Editor-in-Chief of in the 1990s. He has a BFA in Art Education from the University of Cincinnati, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University. In addition to Penn State Erie, where he has taught for the last twenty-three years, he has taught at Bowling Green State University, where he revised the BFA program which he was in charge of for several years, and at several colleges and universities in Chicago: Columbia College, Loyola University, and Roosevelt University.