Hologram A Novel

A housewife revels in the secret world of her mind filled with historical characters and twisted love stories in this inventive sendup of Southern fiction.

Mrs. Hollingsworth sits at her kitchen table, compiling her grocery list. The subject of the list is not foodstuffs, but memories that never happened, inventions of loves, and strange conspiracies peopled by men who appear in the lonely housewife’s head—men infinitely more real to her than her own husband.
 
Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest gallops into her story, courtesy of media giant Ted Turner and two shady criminal types named Bundy and Oswald who are engaged in a secret experiment to create “the New Southerner.”
 
Her prying daughters believe Mrs. Hollingsworth is losing her mind. But in truth, their mother is simply looking for love via hand-to-hand combat on the surreal battlefield inside her head.
 
Originally published as Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men, Padgett Powell’s Hologram is a stunning literary achievement. Strikingly unique, it is a poignant, funny, and unconventional fever dream brought to lyrical life.
 

Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including The Interrogative Mood, You & Me, and Edisto, a finalist for the National Book Award; and three story collections. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Little Star, and the Paris Review, and he is the recipient of the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Whiting Writers’ Award and the James Tait Black Prize in fiction, the UK’s oldest literary award.