Grove Press
Atlantic Monthly Press
Atlantic Monthly Press
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.
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)
“The spirit of Eudora Welty broods over these adroitly crafted stories set in and around coastal Alabama, evoking a world coiled tight as a conch shell.” —O Magazine, One of 10 Titles to Pick Up Now
“Knight’s prose is pristine, as watertight as the skiffs, barges, and tankers that occupy Mobile Bay . . . No one can deny this author’s command of sentence-level writing, and his paragraphs flow in flawless succession like warm waves from the Gulf.” —Kansas City Star
“Eveningland is tough to put down, thanks to Knight’s masterful command of pacing and suspense. The stories make surprising reversals . . . a sense that whatever the upheavals and changeability of weather may reveal to us, deeper, unreachable mysteries will always lurk beneath the surface.” —Knoxville News Sentinel
“A sublime new collection . . . Knight is a master.” &mdashDeep South Magazine
“[An] exquisitely crafted collection . . . these often funny and heartfelt stories explore life in its messy fullness while also exuding a deep, wistful wisdom.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“From a distinguished Southern writer, a very fine collection capped by a masterful novella.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Knight’s stories are at once simple and intricate, weaving the particulars of geography and weather into family loss from death, divorce, and estrangement, and the awful weight of grief.” —Booklist
“There’s something almost holy in the way Michael Knight writes about his native Alabama, emotional honesty and acuteness of vision leavened with genuine reverence for these people and this place. Taken individually these stories are beautifully crafted–often funny, just as often heartbreaking, always surprising. Taken together, they paint a portrait that is on its surface as refined as the region’s most wistful vision of itself. Beneath that gracious veneer, however, lurk depths of loss and longing that speak to what it means to be alive no matter where you live. This collection of linked stories is as potent as any novel I have read in a long, long time.” —Adam Johnson
“Over the last two decades, Michael Knight has quietly become one of his generation’s premier short story writers. And he might just be the best writer of novellas in the country. This collection gives us a handful of new, shorter gems and one long, beautiful piece you’ll not be able to forget. With each selection, Knight finds people in crisis–whether it’s a cuckolded husband, a down-and-out burglar, or a family preparing for an impending hurricane—and makes that crisis both deeply personal and deeply universal. His literary god-uncles, Fitzgerald and Cheever, would be proud of their nephew and his work. As for the rest of us, how fortunate we are, how truly fortunate, to be able to read his fiction. Michael Knight is an American master.” —Tom Franklin
Winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Prize in FictionLonglisted for the 2018 Southern Book Prize
An Independent Literary Publisher Since 1917
