Goodnight, Nobody

USA Today

Knight's talent is in the details, all the wonderful little moments he hands us along the way. — Anne Stephenson

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. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The nine stories in this collection by PEN/ Hemingway finalist Knight have all been previously published in magazines. "Divining Rod" examines its characters' isolation and loneliness and also the hope that keeps them going. In "Birdland," a blond bird lover comes to a small Alabama town, which is the winter migration stop of parrots, and gets involved with the locals. In "Mitchell's Girls" a man's bad back forces him to think about his relationship with his daughter, stepdaughter, and wife, while in "Feeling Lucky" a man tries to kidnap his daughter. An attempt to win back a wife while writing a story about her is explored in "Ellen's Book," and in the strongest story, "Killing Stonewall Jackson," the lives of Confederate soldiers are revealed. The inability of people to relate to others is explored in stories like "Blackout," where loss of electrical power leads to an explosion of underlying tensions, and "Keeper of Secrets, Teller of Lies," in which a man tries to help a mother and daughter only to be ignored out of suspicion. The stories are concise, poignant, and sometimes ironic. Recommended for larger collections.-Josh Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Mellow scenes from a multitude of lives in repose. Some writers, perhaps as a defense, write about not much in particular: they don't have much of anything to say and so retreat to the safety of the meaningless short story, with no end, no beginning and very little of substance in between. Knight could be mistaken for one of these at first, as his characters tend to be trivial and spend their lives idly, but from the first pages of this second collection (after Dogfight, 1998), it's clear that he is simply a great writer who doesn't have anything to prove. In the glorious "Birdland," he imagines the tiny burg of Elbow, Arkansas, where the narrator lives in his grandmother's house, whiling away the days between Alabama football games, which she watches with the town's entire population on the TV in the general store. The narrator romances The Blonde, a Yankee ornithologist who's in town to study the parrots from New England that winter in Elbow and who is endlessly fascinated by the southern time warp she calls home. By the end, the two are fully in love and gloriously relaxed: "My life purls drowsily out behind me like water. Parrots preen invisibly in the dark." In the misfit epic "Ellen's Book," another low-expectation narrator, Keith, is in love, but unrequited. His wife, Ellen, has left him after their child was still-born, and now he stalks her from afar, developing a strange camaraderie with her father, Wade, who treats Keith with a mixture of contempt and affection. Keith's a writer, but the only story he ever published was one that Ellen rewrote and he submitted by mistake: "I wanted her to know that half a talent was the worst thing in the world. That sort of ordinary can't helpbut break your heart." With an ability to tweeze meaning from the effluvia of the everyday, Knight spins magic out of nothing much. Tremendous. Author tour