SOURCE: Charney, Mark J. “‘Crucified by Truth’: Narrative Voices in Airships.” In Barry Hannah, pp. 21-41. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.

In the following essay, Charney classifies the stories in Barry Hannah's Airships as works about the literal and figurative battlefields of the Civil and Vietnam wars.

In “Water Liars,” the first story in Hannah's collection Airships (1978), the narrator and his wife share stories of past sexual liaisons during a drunken, late-night truth session: “I had a mildly exciting and usual history, and she had about the same, which surprised me. For ten years she'd sworn I was the first. I could not believe her history was exactly equal with mine. It hurt me to think that in an era when there were supposed to be virgins she had allowed anyone but me, and so on.”¹ To escape the truth about his wife, the narrator vacations at Farte Cove...