Goodnight, Nobody - Softcover

Knight, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802140556 ISBN 13: 9780802140555

Publisher: Grove Press, 2003

Synopsis

This new collection from Michael Knight PEN/Hemingway citation recipient and B&N Discover Award finalist whom Esquire praises as a writer of the first rank” thrills and pierces with stories of men and women of breathtaking conviction, pathos, and humor.

The stories in Goodnight, Nobody demonstrate Michael Knights’ exquisite and rare power to make a setting breathe, to invest it with a vitality that seems as authentic and intense as the pulsebeats of his characters.” (The New York Times Book Review) This luminous collection astutely explores rediscovered love, reconciliation, and peace amid the trials of everyday life.

The denizens of Goodnight, Nobody are, like so many of us, bewildered by the circumstances in which they find themselves. The unexpected twists of their lives rendered with expert humor and pathos in Knight’s dark-light style test the limits of the personalities they have known as their own.

In Birdland,” published in The New Yorker, a beautiful Northerner visits a small Alabama town to research the bizarre migration habits of a flock of African parrots from Rhode Island. Feeling Lucky” finds a desperate man kidnapping his own daughter. In the most daring and haunting of these stories, Killing Stonewall Jackson,” which was published in Story, a hardened band of Confederate soldiers resorts to surprising measures to survive on the battlefield. The End of Everything,” published in GQ, weaves together a tender love story and an edge-of-your-seat urban legend, while The Mesmerist,” published in Esquire, is an eerie fairy tale about a man who hypnotizes a stranger and makes her his wife. In Keeper of Secrets, Teller of Lies,” published in Virginia Quarterly Review, a man causes more havoc the harder he tries to help a young mother and her son. In Mitchell’s Girls,” a stay-at-home dad battles the disrespect of youth and a paralyzing bad back. Ellen’s Book” hilariously describes the yearning a man feels for his estranged wife. In Blackout,” a suburban neighborhood’s pent-up jealousies and fears explode under the cover of darkness.

Knight’s sensibility is potent and unique, stirring tenderness in equal parts with violence. While the settings, chronologies, and characters vary widely throughout the collection, they remain bound by Knight’s simple, elegant prose, his graceful sense of humor, and an unfailing empathy with the self-destructed.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Knight is a native of Alabama and the author of a novel, Divining Rod, and Dogfight and Other Stories, which received a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation. Knight won the Henfield Foundation Award and the 1998 Fellowship of Southern Writers' New Writing Award. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Playboy, Esquire, GQ, Story, and The New Yorker as well as several anthologies. He teaches at the University of Tennessee.

From Publishers Weekly

A nostalgic ex-football star "weeps quietly" after being shown footage of his shining moment; a snowstorm creates a scene that "sparkled like the world was made of broken glass." Delicately wrought characters and quiet, satisfying observations mark Knight's impressive second collection of short fiction (after Dogfight and Other Stories), populated by hard-luck guys trying to stay afloat in an unkind but often very funny world. A normally level-headed Alabama driftwood artist in "Birdland" finds himself helplessly smitten with "the Blond," a pretty ornithologist from New Hampshire who's in town tracking the migration habits of African parrots. She's fiercely independent and resists his marriage proposals, but can't bring herself to walk away from his passionate, over-the-top displays of devotion. In "Ellen's Book," Keith's wife deserts their marriage after a still-born pregnancy. He stalks her at her parents' house, unexpectedly developing an intense-if ambivalent-relationship with Ellen's father, who "understands the simple Algebra of manliness." In "The Mesmerist," a hypnotist on his way to a performance in New Orleans turns a bitter, lonely fellow passenger into a grateful wife. "Blackout" is a hilarious comedy of errors involving two couples, a downed power line, a dead neighbor and a pair of night vision goggles. Just when Knight's characters stray too close to well-trod Raymond Carver territory, an unanticipated turn of events-or turn of phrase-makes them fresh. Knight demonstrates a distinct talent for creating literary mountains from life's molehills.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0802140556
• ISBN 13: 9780802140555
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176