Eveningland: Stories (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
These linked stories, "beautifully crafted," as Adam Johnson says, are set in the bright here and now in the very old world of Mobile and the Alabama coast. Knight knows the place and its history intimately and nails his many characters from Cashdollar, a feckless thief, to Dean and Kendra Walker, a Fairhope attorney and his Sweet Briar-grad wife, to Sister Benedicta, a refugee teacher at Our Lady of the Roses, to the Tenpenny Brothers, old-school owners of the Dauphin Bar and Grill. Their lives are not so unusual—home invasion, perfect parties, real estate, guns, an impending storm—but like any meticulously created fictional world so much is revealed in that very ordinariness. A great read by yet another UM Grisham writer!
— From Lisa
A New York Times Editors' Choice "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
An instant regional bestseller, Eveningland is Alabama-born Michael Knight's powerful short story cycle whose seven stellar tales illuminate the everyday beauty and heartache of life along the shores of serene, history-haunted Mobile Bay, in the years preceding a devastating hurricane. A thought-provoking and deeply satisfying reading experience, Eveningland evokes the Old South without sentimentalizing its loss. --Washington Independent Review of Books
"Impressive...Knight pays careful, writerly attention to the details of desperation."--New York Times Book Review
An instant regional bestseller, Eveningland is Alabama-born Michael Knight's powerful short story cycle whose seven stellar tales illuminate the everyday beauty and heartache of life along the shores of serene, history-haunted Mobile Bay, in the years preceding a devastating hurricane. A thought-provoking and deeply satisfying reading experience, Eveningland evokes the Old South without sentimentalizing its loss. --Washington Independent Review of Books
Michael Knight is the author of the novels The Typist and Divining Rod, the short story collections, Goodnight Nobody and Dogfight and Other Stories, and the novella, The Holiday Season. He teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee and lives in Knoxville with his family.