Good Things is a collection of interconnected short stories that take place throughout the midwest. These portraits follow haunted lives and haunted places, men and women struggling to live the only ways they know how, everybody searching for the good that eludes us all.
Good Things was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Charles Simic as the recipient of the first Fairfield University Book Prize for 2011.
Praise for Good Things:
“The characters in Knittel’s debut collection, Good Things, live at the social periphery, marked by scamming, cheating, shoplifting, drinking, violence, abandonment, suicide, and neglect. Flawed but sympathetic, these characters . . . are all too mortal angels.”
—Joan Connor, How to Stop Loving Someone and The World Before Mirrors
“Good Things offers a compelling look a ordinary people who can’t always control their own lives and destinies. Clear, elegant prose filled with truth and compassion. Nick Knittel is a writer to be watched.”
—Dinty W. Moore, Between Panic & Desire
“There is so much to learn about art and life in Good Things: the balance of high and low, and dark and light, and hard and soft; the real and the surreal within the real; and—best of all—the practice of boundless empathy and affection for one’s fellow man.”
—Porochista Khakpour, Sons and Other Flammable Objects
“Spare, tightly constructed, and meticulously crafted, these stories tell of lives
of lower-middle-class Americans, the isolated and marginalized people many of
our contemporary writers somehow manage not to notice.”
—Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell and Confessions of a Poet Laureate
Good Things can be found at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble Booksellers. Also available as eBook.