Eveningland: Stories

Eveningland: Stories

“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. Eveningland is a luminous collection from “a writer of the first rank.”(Esquire) KIRKUS REVIEW (starred) A quiet, beautifully modulated group of six short stories and a novella set in or near Mobile, Alabama. Knight ( The Typist , 2010, etc.) focuses mostly on characters who belong, as he says with gentle irony, to "the right kind of Mobile family." These are for the most part white Southerners working with--and sometimes against--hereditary privilege: an older generation of male real estate moguls, shipping magnates, lawyers, marina owners and their well-meaning but insulated children, who must grapple with the shadows thrown by these gruff, un-self-conscious self-made men, who, as one of the younger generation puts it, "could take up space like nobody in the world." Knight's style is deceptively plainspoken, with low-key wit and a laconic precision that often ripens, as a story proceeds, into poignancy. One standout, "Jubilee," focuses on a middle-aged bourgeois cliché, a 50th-birthday bash at a grand hotel, but does so with such deftness and delicacy that the reader is ambushed, in the end, by mingled envy, pity, and empathy. As Dean and Kendra walk along the boardwalk toward the party and spy their assembled friends inside, there's a frisson of nerves, a kiss quickly wiped away, and finally a bittersweet revelation, half joy and half caution: "They must stay this course until the end." But the centerpiece and triumph of the collection is its closing novella, Landfall , which tells with enormous finesse, speed, and concision, like a family saga in demi-glace reduction, the mingled stories of a shipyard-owning family--the widow of the paterfamilias, her daughter and two sons, the daughter's two daughters, one son's beloved dog--as a hurricane bears down on Mobile. From a distinguished Southern writer, a very fine collection capped by a masterful novella. PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY REVIEW (starred) The interconnected stories in this exquisitely crafted collection explore the lives of characters living in and around Mobile, Ala., in the years preceding the destruction wrought by a fictional hurricane. A master of the short story, Knight ( The Typist) distills some of life's most significant and transformative experiences into a deceptively small amount of space: a young man's coming of age expressed through his first experience of heartbreak in "Water and Oil"; the entirety of a marriage portrayed in a series of small moments as a middle-aged couple plans a birthday party in "Jubilee"; or a grieving widower descending into old age under the eye of his worried daughters in "The King of Dauphin Island." Characters are frequently brought into potentially violent conflict, such as when a burglar is caught by a teenage girl while robbing a house he thought was empty in "Smash and Grab," or in "Grand Old Party," when a humiliated husband brings a shotgun to the home of his wife's lover. And "Landfall," the novella that closes the collection, is a stunning and heartbreaking portrait of a family trying to stay together as the hurricane is finally upon them. Peppered throughout with regional history that to firmly places the reader in the collection's southern setting, these often funny and heartfelt stories explore life in its messy fullness while also exuding a deep, wistful wisdom. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Associates. (Mar.) "Michael Knight has the rare power to make a setting breathe, to invest it with a vitality that seems as authentic and intense as the pulse beats of his characters." -- New York Times Book Review In his powerful new short sto