The Business of Naming Things The Business of Naming Things

The Business of Naming Things

    • 5.0 • 1 Rating
    • $15.99
    • $15.99

Publisher Description

“Riveting . . . vibrant and unsparing.” —Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)

“Superb. . . . Startlingly original.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Once I started reading these stories, I couldn’t stop. They absorbed me thoroughly, with their taut narratives and evocative language—the language of a poet.” —JAY PARINI, author of Jesus: The Human Face of God and The Last Station

“Sherwood Anderson would recognize this world of lonely, longing characters, whose surface lives Coffey tenderly plumbs. These beautiful stories—spare, rich, wise and compelling—go to the heart.” —FREDERIC TUTEN, author of Self Portraits: Fictions and Tintin in the New World

“Whether [Coffey is] writing about a sinning priest or a man who’s made a career out of branding or about himself, we can smell Coffey’s protagonists and feel their breath on our cheek. Like Chekhov, he must be a notebook writer; how else to explain the strange quirks and the perfect but unaccountable details that animate these intimate portraits?” —EDMUND WHITE, author of Inside a Pearl and A Boy’s Own Story

Among these eight stories, a fan of writer (and fellow adoptee) Harold Brodkey gains an audience with him at his life’s end, two pals take a Joycean sojourn, a man whose business is naming things meets a woman who may not be what she seems, and a father discovers his son is a suspect in an assassination attempt on the president. In each tale, Michael Coffey’s exquisite attention to character underlies the brutally honest perspectives of his disenchanted fathers, damaged sons, and orphans left feeling perpetually disconnected.

Michael Coffey is the author of three books of poems and 27 Men Out, a book about baseball’s perfect games. He also co-edited The Irish in America, a book about Irish immigration to America, which was a companion volume to a PBS documentary series. He divides his time between Manhattan and Bolton Landing, New York. The Business of Naming Things is his first work of fiction.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2014
December 22
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
224
Pages
PUBLISHER
Bellevue Literary Press
SELLER
Perseus Books, LLC
SIZE
819.6
KB
Lobster Tales Lobster Tales
2013
Gargoyles Gargoyles
2006
Mystery Tribune / Issue Nº5 Mystery Tribune / Issue Nº5
2018
All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories
2011
Bright Pages Bright Pages
2008
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
2015
27 Men Out 27 Men Out
2010
Good News, Great Joy Good News, Great Joy
2024
Mystery Without Rhyme or Reason Mystery Without Rhyme or Reason
2015
Renounce, Resist, Rejoice Renounce, Resist, Rejoice
2017
The Handbook of Community Mental Health Nursing The Handbook of Community Mental Health Nursing
2005