Eveningland
Stories
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
