Yeah, yeah, Strange Cowboy, Strange Cowboy, you bet, you bet—but I’m telling everybody twenty-one years ago this very same Sam Michel brought out—not that you would know it for the innattention paid—Under the Light. Ok, that plain book was an assembly of stories, whereas this intricate ditto’s a novel. I see the difference, granted. What I also see is a dandy chance for me—Tyrant’s tyranny so very graciously suspended—to send you back back back to the luminous Under the Light and thus to a constellation of illuminings afire within. Justice for Sam Michel!
—Gordon Lish (Dear Mr. Capote)
Praise for Big Dogs and Flyboys
“Adam Oney, the hero of Sam Michel’s bittersweet debut novel, is rightly named after that first namer. His other forebear is Icarus, only in this version, the boy survives to tell his own story with surpassing compassion for all.”
—Christine Schutt (All Souls, Nightwork)
“Michel creates a character of enormous, unnerving innocence in prose both stealthy and extravagant. The ending is a knockout.”
—Joy Williams (Honored Guest, The Quick and the Dead, The Changeling)
“Sam Michel is such a smart, manic, virtuosic stylist. He’s also a surprising, big-hearted, courageous storyteller, whose considerable talent is firing on all cylinders in Flyer, a book full of odd/beautiful language, and the kind of deep insights that make you suddenly and newly appreciative, of the world around you.”
—George Saunders (Pastoralia, Bounty-Land, In Persuasion Nation)