Michael Knight - Böcker

A New York Times Editors' Choice short story collection hailed as "a fresh masterpiece of Southern fiction . . . touching, haunting and brilliant" (Dallas News).Long considered a master of the form and an essential voice in American fiction, Michael Knight delivers a "deft and wonderful, wholly original" collection of interlinked stories set among the members of a Mobile, Alabama family in the years preceding a devastating hurricane (The New York Times Book Review).Grappling with dramas both epic and personal, from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the "unspeakable misgivings of contentment," Eveningland captures with perfect authenticity of place the ways in which ordinary life astounds us with its complexity.A teenaged girl with a taste for violence holds a burglar hostage in her house on New Year's Eve; a middle-aged couple examines the intricacies of their marriage as they prepare to throw a party; and a real estate mogul in the throes of grief buys up all the property on an island only to be accused of madness by his daughters.These stories, infused with humor and pathos, excavate brilliantly the latent desires and motivations that drive life forward in "a luminous collection from a writer of the first rank" (Esquire).

A New York Times Editors' Choice short story collection hailed as "a fresh masterpiece of Southern fiction . . . touching, haunting and brilliant" (Dallas News).Long considered a master of the form and an essential voice in American fiction, Michael Knight delivers a "deft and wonderful, wholly original" collection of interlinked stories set among the members of a Mobile, Alabama family in the years preceding a devastating hurricane (The New York Times Book Review).Grappling with dramas both epic and personal, from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the "unspeakable misgivings of contentment," Eveningland captures with perfect authenticity of place the ways in which ordinary life astounds us with its complexity.A teenaged girl with a taste for violence holds a burglar hostage in her house on New Year's Eve; a middle-aged couple examines the intricacies of their marriage as they prepare to throw a party; and a real estate mogul in the throes of grief buys up all the property on an island only to be accused of madness by his daughters.These stories, infused with humor and pathos, excavate brilliantly the latent desires and motivations that drive life forward in "a luminous collection from a writer of the first rank" (Esquire).

This new collection from Michael Knight—PEN/Hemingway citation recipient and B&N Discover Award finalist whom Esquire praises as “a writer of the first rank”—thrills and pierces with stories of men and women of breathtaking conviction, pathos, and humor.The stories in Goodnight, Nobody demonstrate Michael Knights’ exquisite and “rare power to make a setting breathe, to invest it with a vitality that seems as authentic and intense as the pulsebeats of his characters.” (The New York Times Book Review) This luminous collection astutely explores rediscovered love, reconciliation, and peace amid the trials of everyday life.The denizens of Goodnight, Nobody are, like so many of us, bewildered by the circumstances in which they find themselves. The unexpected twists of their lives—rendered with expert humor and pathos in Knight’s dark-light style—test the limits of the personalities they have known as their own.In “Birdland,” published in The New Yorker, a beautiful Northerner visits a small Alabama town to research the bizarre migration habits of a flock of African parrots from Rhode Island. “Feeling Lucky” finds a desperate man kidnapping his own daughter. In the most daring and haunting of these stories, “Killing Stonewall Jackson,” which was published in Story, a hardened band of Confederate soldiers resorts to surprising measures to survive on the battlefield. “The End of Everything,” published in GQ, weaves together a tender love story and an edge-of-your-seat urban legend, while “The Mesmerist,” published in Esquire, is an eerie fairy tale about a man who hypnotizes a stranger and makes her his wife. In “Keeper of Secrets, Teller of Lies,” published in Virginia Quarterly Review, a man causes more havoc the harder he tries to help a young mother and her son. In “Mitchell’s Girls,” a stay-at-home dad battles the disrespect of youth and a paralyzing bad back. “Ellen’s Book” hilariously describes the yearning a man feels for his estranged wife. In “Blackout,” a suburban neighborhood’s pent-up jealousies and fears explode under the cover of darkness.Knight’s sensibility is potent and unique, stirring tenderness in equal parts with violence. While the settings, chronologies, and characters vary widely throughout the collection, they remain bound by Knight’s simple, elegant prose, his graceful sense of humor, and an unfailing empathy with the self-destructed.

“Ten stories cut like gems from American family life . . . [with] a gracious patina and a drawl of violence.” —Los Angeles Times“A writer of the first rank. . . . [Knight] writes gently and with great gobs of empathy.”—Esquire“Wonderfully humane.” —PlayboyA Los Angeles Times Notable Book, Michael Knight’s stunning debut delivers ten tales of ordinary people seized by extraordinary circumstances as their attempts at human connection result in frustrating false starts and ruinous misunderstandings. Knight expertly unveils fragile family ties, secret compulsions, and the nagging doggedness of love as he taps into our collective human experience to remind us, with unerring, piercing insight, of what it means to be alive. By turns unpredictable and wise, sorrowful and triumphant, Dogfight and Other Stories reveals the transformative power of life’s small struggles.

Simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, The Holiday Season and its companion piece, Love at the End of the Year are tender ruminations on the nature of family, the power of love, and a particularly complicated time of year.  In The Holiday Season, Jeff, Ted, and Frank Posey are still trying to figure out how to be a family three years after the death of the wife and mother who bound them together. As the year winds to a close and the holidays threaten to unearth the usual myriad of emotions and memories, hairline fractures in the Poseys’ relationships finally splinter and crack over what should be, but never are, simple dilemmas: where to spend the holidays and when it is finally time to break with old traditions. The second novella, Love at the End of the Year, is an intoxicating tale that weighs up love in all its many forms over the course of a single, magical Alabama New Year’s Eve.

After the deaths of his parents, Simon Bell returns to his hometown of Sherwood, Alabama, hoping for a simple, quiet existence. But when he meets Delia Holladay one hot, unmoving summer day, latent needs and desires are awakened. Delia is young, beautiful, and married. As their emotions deepen, the affair slips beyond their control, building to a final reckoning that will leave no one untouched. Divining Rod tells a richly layered tale of adultery, love, and murder, as it follows the arc of one fateful romance to its inevitable and heartbreaking conclusion.

Written with the stunning economy of language for which Michael Knight's work has always been praised, The Typist is a rich and powerful work of historical fiction that expertly chronicles both the politics of the Pacific theater of World War II, and the personal relationships borne from the tragedies of warfare. When Francis Vancleave ("Van") joins the army in 1944, he expects his term of service to pass uneventfully. His singular talent-typing ninety-five words a minute-keeps him off the battlefield and in General MacArthur's busy Tokyo headquarters, where his days are filled with paperwork in triplicate and letters of dictation. But little does Van know that the first year of the occupation will prove far more volatile for him than for the U.S. Army. When he's bunked with a troubled combat veteran-cum-black marketer and recruited to babysit MacArthur's eight-year-old son, Van is suddenly tangled in the complex-and risky-personal lives of his compatriots.As he brushes shoulders with panpan girls and Communists on the streets of Tokyo, Van struggles to uphold his convictions in the face of unexpected conflict-especially the startling news from his war bride, a revelation that threatens Van with a kind of war wound he never anticipated.

From the award-winning writer of Eveningland and The Typist, Michael Knight, At Briarwood School for Girls is an incisive, witty, beautifully-written novel set at a boarding school in the Virginia countrysideIt’s 1994 and Lenore Littlefield is a junior at Briarwood School for Girls. She plays basketball. She hates her roommate. History is her favorite subject. She has told no one that she’s pregnant. Everything, in other words, is under control.Meanwhile, Disney has announced plans to build a new theme park just up the road, a “Technicolor simulacrum of American History” right in the middle of one of the most history-rich regions of the country. If successful, the development will forever alter the character of Prince William County, VA, and have unforeseeable consequences for the school.When the threat of the theme park begins to intrude on the lives of the faculty and students at Briarwood, secrets will be revealed and unexpected alliances will form. Lenore must decide whom she can trust—will it be a middle-aged history teacher struggling to find purpose in his humdrum life? A lonely basketball coach tasked with directing the school play? A reclusive playwright still grappling with her own Briarwood legacy? Or a teenage ghost equally adept at communicating with the living via telephone or Ouija board?Following a cast of memorable characters as they reckon with questions about fate, history, and the possibility of happiness, At Briarwood School for Girls is a stunning and inventive new work from a master storyteller.