 |
 |
|
Michael Byers received his MFA from the University of Michigan and was a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. His story collection, The Coast of Good Intentions, won the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Byers also won a Whiting Foundation Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize. His stories have been selected for both The Best American Short Stories and the O'Henry Awards.
Photo © Linda A. Cicero
Long for This World
• Read a Review
Michael Byers has chosen the medical community in dot-com Seattle as the appropriate setting for his stunning and suspenseful debut novel, about genetics, medical ethics, and sudden wealth, and with characters so real you feel you've known each one forever. A Seattle geneticist, Dr. Henry Moss, makes a remarkable discovery, which — as he explores its many implications — forces him to ask himself hard questions on both personal and professional levels.
Henry Moss's specialty is a genetic condition known as Hickman syndrome, which causes children to age very rapidly and die (as though elderly) as teenagers. In the course of his work with two young Hickman patients, one dying of old age at fourteen and the other radiantly healthy, Moss discovers a secondary mutation within the healthy boy's chromosomes — a mutation that is keeping the boy alive, and perhaps perpetually young.
Henry Moss knows the mutation could make him very rich; he also knows the mutation could help to keep the dying boy alive, but to use it that way would be highly unethical, amounting to unmonitored human experimentation. Meanwhile, on the personal front, Henry's wife, an Austrian immigrant who is also a physician, has become unhappy with her work and turns a sharply critical eye on American culture. Their two teenagers are in their own kinds of trouble: Sandra, seventeen, is in love with basketball and with the wrong boy; Darren, fourteen, finds himself irresistibly drawn to his father's dying Hickman patient.
Together and separately, these characters find themselves facing the same questions: How should I behave? How do I know when I'm doing the right thing?
Michael Byers's Summer Reading List
The Quick and the Dead
by Joy Williams
Williams is an old favorite but I have yet to catch up to this novel of hers, which has been recommended to me over and over again -- I'm going to wait until I have a nice clear weekend and lock myself away.
The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber
This one too has been recommended to me many times from many different directions -- I've never read Faber before, but I hear only good things, and the jacket description is irresistible. Sex! Passion! Intrigue!
Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages
by Mark Abley
The number of spoken languages is falling dramatically; this book lays out the wealth of
unique human thought that any language intrinsically contains -- and describes the great loss we all suffer when any language vanishes.
The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
The stories in Interpreter of Maladies were so adroit and elegantly controlled that I can't wait to see what she does with the longer form.
The Dean's December
by Saul Bellow
I love Bellow's two-fisted, gutty,psychologically impacted characters -- Albert Corde is a favorite; I love too the means by which Bellow manages to import argument into narrative, so I'm planning on rereading this one slowly, to savor it."
Back to Authors'
Summer Reading Lists
|
|
|
