Michael Byers’ first book, The Coast of Good Intentions (1998), was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Long for This World (2003) won the annual fiction prize from Friends of American Writers and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Both were New York Times Notable Books. His most recent novel is Percival's Planet (2010). Byers’ fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan.
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The Coast of Good IntentionsStoriesFrom"Shipmates Down Under"
…nothing changed with Nadia. She didn’t get better, she didn’t get worse, her fever never went below a hundred and one. I visited her before and after work all week. Her IV bag emptied and was replaced; the back of her hand around the needle was bruised dark as an Oreo. She would wake up occasionally and say hello, her voice hoarse, her palate swollen and red when I peered in, and I would say hello back, touch her face. Ted came after school and read aloud from his book, sitting with his legs crossed, his big dark head bent over the pages. Every day he bought a single orange soda in a paper cup for sixty-five cents. Nurses came in red fur hats, sang “Jingle Bells” and “O Christmas Tress.” The rash traveled down her neck and back, across her stomach, drifting, and I imagined something about the size of my palm moving under her skin, some unformed thing lost, looking for a place to fasten itself.
The Coast of Good Intentions:Stories -
The Coast of Good IntentionsStoriesFrom"Blue River, Red Sun"
Joseph couldn’t get anyone to buy his dead father’s house, and he knew why: it was old and full of his dead father’s things, and the roof leaked when it rained. But Joseph couldn’t clean out the closets or mow the lawn or really do anything normal because his wife May had filed for divorce and it was just about killing him. It also took up most of his spare time, so for two months Joseph spent his days teaching and most of his evenings with his lawyer, Alan Pinkerman, in his lawyer’s green-carpeted office in the mall, Joseph’s weakening heart stretched on a rack while Alan Pinkerman sharpened pencils and sucked coffee back and forth through his terrible teeth.
The Coast of Good Intentions:Stories -
The Coast of Good IntentionsStoriesFrom"In The Kingdom of Prester John"
In the sack of mail were three newspapers still wrapped in their rubber bands, a phone bill, and five brochures from exterminators. “Goddamn that nuthead,” my mother said, fanning through them. “He’s worried about bugs now.” She dropped his mail on the hall table and started to leave. “Wait a minute,” she said, and disappeared. She came back with a silver serving spoon, long and ornate, which she slipped into her purse. “I deserve something out of this.”
The Coast of Good Intentions:Stories
“Vivid . . . lyrical and exact . . . The search for Planet X offers Mr. Byers a wonderful opportunity for dramatizing the human desire for discovery, but he’s after an even wider story, one that probes the very nature of searching . . . A deeply generous attempt to explore the forces that make us restless, that make us want to wander the desert or peer into the sky or pace along our own fence lines, dreaming of finding something that might not be out there. Mr. Byers reminds us that whether we’re gripped by desire for a new planet or for another human being, that yearning has dignity and its own strange logic.” —The New York Times [on Percival’s Planet]
“Byers’s stories are imprinted with humour, intelligence and grace. This faultless collection’s resonances are universal, as is the author’s uncannily skilled turn of phrase.” —Chris Power, The London Times [on The Coast of Good Intentions]
“His characters are young and old; male and female; straight and gay; literate and uneducated. All of them, even the walk-ons, are independent and convincing . . . this [collection] sets Byers apart from most young writers, not only in his generation but in previous ones . . . Most of Byers’ stories are disarmingly direct and intimate, yet they also represent considerable technical accomplishment; there are complex patterns of mirrors and receding reverberations . . . Even the shorter stories are resonant and complicated . . . When Byers is at his best it’s patronizing to call him promising. He’s there already, and what you remember is not his writing but his people, how they feel, and how they get along with the business of living, something Byers understands so well.” —The Boston Globe [on The Coast of Good Intentions]
Selected Works
