It's 1994 and Lenore Littlefield is a junior at Briarwood School for Girls. She plays basketball. She hates her roommate. History is her favorite subject. She has told no one that she's pregnant. Everything, in other words, is under control. Meanwhile, Disney has announced plans to build a new theme park just up the road, a "Technicolor simulacrum of American History" right in the middle of one of the most history-rich regions of the country. If successful, the development will forever alter the character of Prince William County, VA, and have unforeseeable consequences for the school. When the threat of the theme park begins to intrude on the lives of the faculty and students at Briarwood, secrets will be revealed and unexpected alliances will form. Lenore must decide whom she can trust—will it be a middle-aged history teacher struggling to find purpose in his humdrum life? A lonely basketball coach tasked with directing the school play? A reclusive playwright still...

“Michael Knight is more than a master of the short story. He knows the true pace of life and does not cheat it, all the while offering whopping entertainment."—Barry HannahLong 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...

Simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, The Holiday Season and its companion piece, Love at the End of the Year are tender ruminations on the nature of family, the power of love, and a particularly complicated time of year. In The Holiday Season, Jeff, Ted, and Frank Posey are still trying to figure out how to be a family three years after the death of the wife and mother who bound them together. As the year winds to a close and the holidays threaten to unearth the usual myriad of emotions and memories, hairline fractures in the Poseys' relationships finally splinter and crack over what should be, but never are, simple dilemmas: where to spend the holidays and when it is finally time to break with old traditions. The second novella, Love at the End of the Year, is an intoxicating tale that weighs up love in all its many forms over the course of a single, magical Alabama New Year's Eve.

“Ten stories cut like gems from American family life . . . [with] a gracious patina and a drawl of violence.” —Los Angeles Times“A writer of the first rank. . . . [Knight] writes gently and with great gobs of empathy.”—Esquire“Wonderfully humane.” —PlayboyA Los Angeles Times Notable Book, Michael Knight’s stunning debut delivers ten tales of ordinary people seized by extraordinary circumstances as their attempts at human connection result in frustrating false starts and ruinous misunderstandings. Knight expertly unveils fragile family ties, secret compulsions, and the nagging doggedness of love as he taps into our collective human experience to remind us, with unerring, piercing insight, of what it means to be alive. By turns unpredictable and wise, sorrowful and triumphant, Dogfight and Other Stories reveals the transformative power of life’s small struggles.

After the deaths of his parents, Simon Bell returns to his hometown of Sherwood, Alabama, hoping for a simple, quiet existence. But when he meets Delia Holladay one hot, unmoving summer day, latent needs and desires are awakened. Delia is young, beautiful, and married. As their emotions deepen, the affair slips beyond their control, building to a final reckoning that will leave no one untouched. Divining Rod tells a richly layered tale of adultery, love, and murder, as it follows the arc of one fateful romance to its inevitable and heartbreaking conclusion.

Written with the stunning economy of language for which Michael Knight's work has always been praised, The Typist is a rich and powerful work of historical fiction that expertly chronicles both the politics of the Pacific theater of World War II, and the personal relationships borne from the tragedies of warfare. When Francis Vancleave (“Van") joins the army in 1944, he expects his term of service to pass uneventfully. His singular talent—typing ninety-five words a minute—keeps him off the battlefield and in General MacArthur's busy Tokyo headquarters, where his days are filled with paperwork in triplicate and letters of dictation.But little does Van know that the first year of the occupation will prove far more volatile for him than for the U.S. Army. When he's bunked with a troubled combat veteran cum-black marketer and recruited to babysit MacArthur's eight-year-old son, Van is suddenly tangled in the complex—and risky—personal...