Showing results by author "Michael Knight" in All Categories

Welcome to Dragons & Damsels! Come, come, have a seat. We have a special treat for you. Look behind me—do you see those names on the wall? Yes, I see you recognize some of them. They've given me something wondrous, wondrous indeed. Right here in this tome are tales that are meant to excite, arouse, and sate a listener's soul with action, lust, and adventure.

Hosted by Michael Knight

A Muslim punk house in Buffalo, New York, inhabited by burqa-wearing riot girls, mohawked Sufis, straight-edge Sunnis, Shi'a skinheads, Indonesian skaters, Sudanese rude boys, gay Muslims, drunk Muslims, and feminists. Their living room hosts parties and prayers, with a hole smashed in the wall to indicate the direction of Mecca. Their life together mixes sex, dope, and religion in roughly equal amounts, expressed in devotion to an Islamo-punk subculture, "taqwacore".

A teenage 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 humour and pathos, excavate brilliantly the latent desires and motivations that drive life forward.

Long 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.

When Francis "Van" Vancleave joins the army in 1944, he expects his term of service to pass uneventfully. His singular talent - typing 95 words per 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 US Army.

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 in Virginia, a "Technicolor simulacrum of American history". 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.