Michael Knight and Allen Wier, Southern novelists, joined moderator Steve Paul for the December talk in the Library’s Writers at Work series on December 4, 2008 at the Central Library. Check out the work of these authors or discover more Southern fiction at the Library.

Books by Michael Knight & Allen Wier

The Holiday Season
By Michael Knight
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.

Goodnight, Nobody
By Michael Knight
This luminous collection of stories astutely explores rediscovered love, reconciliation, and peace amid the trials of everyday life. In each story, characters are surprised by their mettle even as they recognize their fallibility; they are convinced of the power of love, family, and trust even as they experience the danger of obsession, anger, and simple accident.

Dogfight, and Other Stories
By Michael Knight
In this collection, Michael Knight delivers ten tales of ordinary people whose attempts at human connection often result in false starts, misunderstandings, or heavy silence.

Divining Rod
By Michael Knight
Simon Bell returns to his childhood home in Alabama, haunted by the deaths of his parents and begins an illicit affair with married Delia Holladay. Their liaison will bring about a final reckoning no one could have anticipated.

Tehano
By Allen Wier
African American freedmen and slaves, Native American warriors and their women, Confederate and Union veterans, immigrants, and a host of other citizens enact their destinies in Comanche territory in Texas during the final years of the nineteenth century.

Blanco
By Allen Wier
Wier’s first novel takes place in a small town in Texas during the late 1950s. A disconnected family is at the center of this book featuring themes of love, loneliness, and violence.

Things About to Disappear: Stories
By Allen Wier
This early collection of eight stories displays Wier’s craftsmanship as a writer.

More Southern Fiction

Best of the South: From the Second Decade of New Stories from the South
Edited by Shannon Ravenel, selected and introduced by Anne Tyler
Like the venerable Best American Short Stories series, each volume of New Stories from the South collects the best stories published in the previous year's magazines and literary journals. From the 186 stories found in the ten volumes from 1996 to 2005, Anne Tyler has picked her favorites and introduced them with warmth, insight, and her own brand of quiet literary authority.

Mermaids in the Basement
By Michael Lee West
The bestselling author of Crazy Ladies tells a funny and poignant tale that explores the complex bonds between a daughter and her father.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
By Carson McCullers
McCuller's classic American tale of deaf-mute, John Singer, who becomes the confidant of various misfits in a small Georgia town in the 1930s.

Down River
By John Hart
Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel, this heart-pounding thriller tells the story of a river whose banks are filled with lies and murder, and the man whose destiny lies deep below its surface.

The Last Girls: A Novel
By Lee Smith
The Last Girls centers around four middle-aged Southern women who, as students at an idyllic Blue Ridge women's college thirty years before, were inspired by Huckleberry Finn to take their own raft trip down the Mississippi River. Now a tragedy brings them back together for a repeat voyage under very different circumstances--aboard a luxurious cruise steamboat.

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
By Eudora Welty
This complete collection includes all the published stories of Eudora Welty. There are forty-one stories in all, including the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories.

Find more Southern fiction in the library.

Book descriptions provided by BookLetters.