The Pentecostal Home for Flying Children: Lost Stories, Stray Poems & Questionable Essays

"A man who thinks like Will Ferrell and dreams like Samuel Taylor Coleridge." -The New York Times Book ReviewIn 1984, Shreveport, Louisiana had turbulent race relations, no economy, and a rash of flying teenagers.They were the abandoned children of The Redbird, a second-rate superhero who could do nothing but fly. The town loved him anyway - until it came out he'd moved here for their bored housewives, their prodigal daughters, and their all-too-easily-seduced Baptist Ladies' Prayer Circle. Then he flew off and left the babies behind.That's the title story - originally published in Oxford American's Best of the South and anthologized four times.The rest of this collection is just as wonderful and prismatic, and most of it is true.Thirty years of lost stories, stray poems, and questionable essays, in four parts: memory and poems and journalism; ten chapters of an abandoned novel about oil money and infertility in eighties Dallas; four short stories; and the world's most insufferable manifestation guide, which is actually a novella, which people keep mistaking for a real self-help book.It opens with $20,000 in donated Stetsons flying out the back of a U-Haul on LBJ Freeway, and a twenty-three-year-old copywriter running into traffic to get them back. That's the book.Arguably, it's Clarke's whole career.For readers of David Sedaris, Eudora Welty, Kurt Vonnegut, George Saunders, and Flannery O'Connor.