Novel of the week
The Holiday Season by Michael Knight
The Holiday Season
by Michael Knight
(Grove, $18)
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Amid the “seasonal avalanche” of holiday-themed books, Michael Knight’s slim new work of fiction may be the one best suited for serious readers, said Jacqueline Bliss in USA Today. Nobody writes better about “the country club set” of today’s South than the Alabama-born Knight, said John Sledge in the Alabama Press-Register. The two novellas he’s paired in The Holiday Season explore with insight and humor the family tensions and squabbles that this time of year is notorious for. Yet he holds a reader’s attention “without resorting to cheap devices and pyrotechnics.” In the title piece, said Maria Browning in the Nashville Scene, the “unfavored” adult son in a small Mobile, Ala., family spends Thanksgiving and Christmas trying to mediate between a first-born brother intent on playing host and their stubborn widowed father, who refuses to surrender old traditions. The second novella, Love at the End of the Year, follows a larger cast of Mobilians during their New Year’s Eve revelries. Both stories’ endings remain true to the way that life usually “defies our hopes.” In one of Knight’s biggest surprises, silly, debauched New Year’s “winds up being life-affirming, and filled with intense, if imperfect, joy.”
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
The Week contest: Swift stimulus
Puzzles and Quizzes
By The Week US Published
-
'It's hard to resist a sweet deal on a good car'
Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
By Justin Klawans, The Week US Published
-
10 concert tours to see this winter
The Week Recommends Keep warm traveling the United States — and the world — to see these concerts
By Justin Klawans, The Week US Published
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-ups
feature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”
By The Week Staff Last updated