February 4, 2000
RELEASE ON RECEIPT

ACCLAIMED WRITER AND OBERLIN ALUMNUS MICHAEL BYERS TO READ AT OBERLIN

Tuesday, Feb. 22

7:30 p.m.

King Building
Room 106
(corner of N. Professor and W. College streets)

Free public event

For more information
please call
the Oberlin College
Creative Writing
Program at
(440) 775-6567

OBERLIN, OHIO -- Writer Michael Byers, whose debut collection of short stories The Coast of Good Intentions (Houghton Mifflin, 1998) is now in its third printing, will give a reading at Oberlin College, his alma mater.

Reviewers have made much of that fact that Byers's storytelling goes beyond the artful anxieties of the Gen-X generation--he was 28 years old when his book was published. New York magazine notes that he "does not take undue advantage of being only 28: Although he sometimes writes about the youngish in his new collection . . . what results is always a great deal more than a mere generational report."

The Wall Street Journal's Elizabeth Bukowski writes that "it was beginning to look as if oysters would dance jigs before a twentysomething writer ventured into themes beyond stylish maladjustment, self-important self-pity and the glories of decades-old pop culture. Then came The Coast of Good Intentions, a wise, un-Generation-X-like collection . . . [that] masterfully portrays incomplete lives and the dull ache in the characters who live them."

Set in the Pacific Northwest--Byers is a Seattle native--the stories are "about the shadowy obsessive passions that govern and shape our lives," writes novelist Charles Baxter, who calls them "wise, beautiful and necessary. It's hard to imagine so much knowledge of life coming from so young a writer, but there it is, clear as day."

Byers has won numerous prizes and awards for his work. In 1999 he received the Sue Kauffman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and he was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. He is a recipient of the Whiting Foundation Writer's Award and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. His stories have been selected for The Best American Short Stories 1997, Prize Stories 1995: The O'Henry Awards, and featured in American Short Fiction and the Missouri Review, among other publications.

Byers studied fiction writing with Diane Vreuls at Oberlin and graduated in 1991. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Michigan.

Oberlin's creative writing program and its alumni association are sponsoring his reading, which will be followed by a booksigning.

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Media Contact: Marci Janas 2/4/00 #45 mj