The Coast of Good Intentions - Softcover

Michael Byers grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and the stories in The Coast of Good Intentions evoke that region's cloudy and caffeinated landscape with impressive ease. He gives each location the particularity of a fingerprint: "The alders were in full leaf," Byers writes in a typical bit of Sensurround prose, "and the cranberry bog was a deep russet now in the middle of the summer. Down at the end of the road another little house sat, abandoned, its door gaping open as if to breathe, a tree growing through the windows. Somewhere we could hear a tractor. The ocean was a mile away, across the highway, invisible, but I could smell it, the salty air." Yet the author never indulges in merely bucolic scene-painting. Instead, he explores how the landscape shapes his characters, who seem alternately depressed and comforted by the perpetual sight of thunderheads "piling themselves against the Olympics, like gray balloons against a ceiling." What's more, Byers has a wonderful touch when it come to rendering the middle ground of happiness. In stories like "Shipmates Down Under" and "In Spain, One Thousand and Three," his protagonists seem to stagger under their allotments of disappointment--and remain surprisingly and persuasively alive to possibility. This would be a impressive debut for a late-blooming, middle-aged master. Coming from a 28-year-old, it's an astonishing performance, which makes the word precocious sound limp and irrelevant.

Michael Byers's story collection The Coast of Good Intentions won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Long for This World was featured on the History Channel's "Mavericks, Miracles, and Medicine." The recipient of a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award, Byers lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and two children.