In his powerful new short story cycle, Alabama-born Michael Knight illuminates the everyday beauty and heartache of life along the shores of serene, history-haunted Mobile Bay in the days leading up to a powerful hurricane "Michael Knight is more than a master of the short story. He knows the true pace of life and does not cheat it, all the while offering whopping entertainment."-Barry Hannah Long considered a master of the form and an essential voice in American fiction, Michael Knight's stories have been lauded by writers such Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Gilbert, Barry Hannah, and Richard Bausch. Now, with Eveningland he returns to the form that launched his career, delivering an arresting collection of interlinked stories set among the "right kind of Mobile family" in the years preceding a devastating hurricane. Grappling with dramas both epic and personal, from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the "unspeakable misgivings of contentment," Eveningland captures with crystalline poeticism and 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, told with economy and precision, infused with humor and pathos, excavate brilliantly the latent desires and motivations that drive life forward. Author bio: Michael Knight is the author of the novels The Typist and Divining Rod, the short story collections, Goodnight Nobody and Dogfight and Other Stories, and the novella, The Holiday Season. He teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee and lives in Knoxville with his family.
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“Narrator Scott Sowers…excels as Knight’s stories plumb the depths of the human heart by drawing on both the comedy and tragedy of living in Mobile. Sowers’ drawling pace suggests the heat and humidity of the area, and he portrays its population with insight. In one story, Sowers lets exhaustion and frustration leak into his voice as the cleanup of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill devastates the locals. Knight brings these stories to life by focusing on the details that make life both beautiful and horrific.”
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