Luminous and devastating, a portrait of modern masculinity as shaped by class, by trauma, and by silence, but also by the courage to love and to survive. Sean's brother Anthony is a hard man. When they were kids their ma did her best to keep him out of trouble, but you can't say anything to Anto. Sean was supposed to be different. He was supposed to leave and never come back. But Sean does come back. Arriving home after university, he finds Anthony's drinking is worse than ever. Meanwhile, the jobs in Belfast have vanished, Sean's degree isn't worth the paper it's written on, and no one will give him the time of day. One night he loses control and assaults a stranger at a party, and everything is tipped into chaos. Close to Home witnesses the aftermath of that night as Sean attempts to make sense of who he has become, and to reckon with the relationships that have shaped him, for better and worse. Drawing from his own experiences, Michael Magee examines the forces that keep young working-class men in harm's way, in a debut novel that shines with intelligence and humanity on every page. Close to Home is an extraordinary work of fiction about deciding what kind of a man you want to be and finding your place in the scarred city you call home.

Close to Home: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Magee, Michael

Literary

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Surveys the color and excitement of thoroughbred racing in the 1970s, with special chapters devoted to champions such as Seattle Slew, Secretariat, Affirmed and Spectacular Bid

Champions

Sports & Outdoors

William Morrow & Co.

Close to Home

Picador Paper

Poetry. Flarf. "As the title of his book suggests, Michael Magee's poetry buzzes with the legislative, polemical, and liberatory static of American political history: specifically the declarative rhetoric of the founding fathers (from Jefferson and Franklin to Woodward and Bernstein) and its slow refraction into the 'sacred word' of mediaspeak, multicultural cant, and all the cynically mediated chatter that masks the 'historindustry of worlds.' This is social poetry, very serious about its engagement with public discourse, but anarchically ornery in its playful paronomastic splintering...a funked-up powerwalk, an essential dance mix that is not just infectious, but informed" --K. Silem Mohammad.

Morning Constitutional

Poetry

Spencer Books

The mood and scope of the whole are sounded in Part I, The New Odysseus, a series of twenty linked poems,where a somewhat weary new Odysseus invokes his legendary adventures and various gods as he wandersboth in the Tacoma present and yet in other lands and times, with an eye on our absurd world of the coffeehouse, sex change, the mall, pogo sticks, an anomalous game of cricket, poverty, yearning, old age, mortality,a quiet, bleak fading. It is a phantasmagorical trip, told with a kind of rueful even solemn whimsy whichis his own.The following two sections reflect Magee's personal odyssey. They give us back the varied worlds he hasinhabited, their landscapes and meanings, through the vision of artists and poets whose personae Mageeexplores and at times adopts. It is a strange world, steeped in art, populated by the active ghosts of Proust,Whitman, Roethke, Chagall, O'Keeffe, Yeats, Cather and others, as well as by spirits like Rapunzel. But then ahomeless man speaks as he wakes in his cold blankets near Seattle docks. Or we pause in front of a Dalipainting to consider time itself. It is quite a trip.The book is dedicated to Jean Musser, the poet's late wife and fellow poet. She also appears movingly in afew of the poems. Her presence is felt throughout.--Ben Drake

How We Move Toward Light: New & Selected Poems

Arts & Photography

Moonpath Press

Terra Firma: Sacred Ground Poems 1970 - 2022

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Books by Magee, Michael