Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2015
224 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
Among these eight stories, a fan of writer (and fellow adoptee) Harold Brodkey gains an audience with him at his life's end; two pals take a Joycean sojourn; a man in the business of naming things meets a woman who may not be what she seems; a father discovers his son is suspected in an assassination attempt on the President. In each tale, Coffey's exquisite attention to character and nuance underlies the brutally honest perspectives of his disenchanted fathers, damaged sons, and orphans left feeling perpetually disconnected.
"Starred Review. Riveting...vibrant and unsparing." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Superb...startlingly original." - Library Journal
"A clutch of well-crafted stories, thick with literary references, that turn on busted relationships between men and women and fathers and sons. Sober and smart writing that evokes the more mannered American stylists of the 1960s and '70s." - Kirkus
"Once I started reading these stories, I couldn't stop. They absorbed me thoroughly, with their taut narratives and evocative language - the language of a poet." - Jay Parini, author of Jesus: The Human Face of God and The Last Station
"Sherwood Anderson would recognize this world of lonely, longing characters, whose surface lives Coffey tenderly plumbs. These beautiful stories - spare, rich, wise and compelling - go to the heart." - Frederic Tuten, author of Self Portraits: Fictions and Tintin in the New World
"Whether [Coffey is] writing about a sinning priest or a man who's made a career out of branding or about himself, we can smell Coffey's protagonists and feel their breath on our cheek. Like Chekhov, he must be a notebook writer; how else to explain the strange quirks and the perfect but unaccountable details that animate these intimate portraits?" - Edmund White, author of Inside a Pearl and A Boy's Own Story
This information about The Business of Naming Things was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michael Coffey, formerly the co-editorial director of Publishers Weekly, is the author of several books of poems, a book about baseball's perfect games, and another about Irish immigration to America--which together paint a fairly good portrait of his central interests. Recently, he has begun publishing his fiction, and his new book, The Business of Naming Things, is being published in early 2015. He lives with his wife in Manhattan and in upstate New York, where he was raised. For more information, visit www.michaelcoffeyauthor.com.
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