Books by Allan Gurganus

During the Christmas season, mall pet store manager Vernon Ricketts splits his time between selling irresistible puppies and kittens festooned with holiday bows and shielding the mall's loiterers from its over-zealous manager, “Terminator” Vanderlip. Just days before Christmas, Vernon notices a small, bedraggled girl in a worn overcoat desperately trying to blend into the mall's background. Sensing she's a runaway in trouble, Vernon feels obliged to help. His kindness and their chance encounter will produce a Christmas miracle that becomes a legend as it changes lives. Allan Gurganus’s “A Fool for Christmas” first charmed audiences when he read it on NPR’s “All Things Considered” in 2004. It appears here in print for the first time. The publication of “A Fool for Christmas” is a partnership between Duke University Libraries (which acquired Gurganus's archives in 2018), Horse & Buggy Press, and Duke University Press.

In his first work of fiction in a decade, Allan Gurganus returns to the mythic site of his immortal novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Time has passed; the Internet has arrived; but the daily human dramas in Falls, North Carolina prove that old habits die hard. A banker's daughter seeks the child she was forced to relinquish at birth . . . The disappearance of a star high school student sends ripples through the town, creating a cult led by her stricken mother . . . The friendship between two married men is tested by a devastating flood.Local Souls is a universal tale of gigantic hopes battling small-town conventions - a dark comedy of adultery, obsession and incest, told with affection and piercing insight.