Eveningland

Book excerpt: 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).