Eveningland: Stories

Deft and wonderful, wholly original . . . sharp and fresh . . . Knight pays careful, writerly attention to the details of desperation. His characters--often entombed in middle-age despair--in their weakened, even futile attempts to shift position, if not actually escape, give a reader the sensation of watching the lateral movements of blobs of life wriggling beneath a microscope. --Rick Bass, New York Times Book Review

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

With both suspense and humor, Knight explores 'the going under of the evening land' in this diverse collection. A thought-provoking and deeply satisfying reading experience, Eveningland evokes the Old South without sentimentalizing its loss. Yet its characters, and the reader, too, know that it's evening. And it's very late. --Clifford Garstang, Washington Independent Review of Books

Read individually, some of the stories can feel airy, static, in a few cases shorn of a satisfying conclusion; taken together, however, they exert a tremendous and accretive pressure as those endings--not so much withheld as postponed--take devastating shape in the reader's mind. --Jonathan Miles, Garden & Gun

A fresh masterpiece of Southern fiction . . . you can add the name of Michael Knight to a reputable list of Southern short story writers who realize that fiction set in a specific region doesn't have to be provincial . . . His prose is touching, haunting and brilliant. --Charles Ealy, Dallas News

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. --Kevin Kotur, 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. --Emily Choate, Knoxville News Sentinel

A sublime new collection . . . Knight is a master. --David Byron Queen, Deep South Magazine

Like 'The Twilight Zone' . . . For Rod Serling, it was the dread of nuclear holocaust and McCarthyism; for Knight, it's dread of the dusk of American contentment . . . Knight's protagonists are often adrift, and in memorable ways . . . Knight brings sympathy to the downtrodden. --Rob Neufeld, Asheville Citizen-Times

Superbly drawn . . . [these stories] seek to map complex, difficult, often hidden psychological and emotional truths . . . confronting the passage of time, regret, and loves lost and found--all of which is handled with great humility, insight, and compassion . . . Essential for fans of literary fiction. --Library Journal (starred review)

[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

Michael Knight is a supremely gifted writer and his latest collection--Eveningland-- offers rich and lasting proof of this on every page. I am in awe of how skillfully he manages tension and suspense on the page--a slow burning flame that might explode or not, might manifest as tragedy in the physical world or simply the painful collapse of a human heart. There is humor and grief and an aching sense of longing that is nearly impossible to catch and put on the page. But Michael Knight does it and not only that, he does it beautifully. --Jill McCorkle

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