Radiant Days is my first book. Shoemaker & Hoard published it this year. My shorter work can be found in Swink, Massachusetts Review, Cutbank, Northwest Review, Other Voices and the Boise Weekly. I've been the recipient of the Idaho Commission on the Arts Literature Fellowship, Fishtrap Fellowship, ICA Quickfunds Grant, and a Fiction Fellowship from the University of Montana, where I received an MFA. I live in Missoula, Montana with Catherine, Ignatius, and Eamon.
About the book:
Radiant Days: A Novel
Stupid with dot-com mania of the '90s, Anthony Sinclair abandons San Francisco to follow the gorgeous but enigmatic Gisela on a search for her lost son in Hungary. In Budapest they meet a group of expats, including Marsh, a brilliant, embittered war correspondent. Anthony thinks he has found in Eastern Europe what his former life was missing: enterprising young people openly questioning U.S. values, determined to remake their own worlds. But when an odd and edgy love triangle emerges and he discovers his mission with Gisela is much darker than he imagined, Anthony
is thrown deeply in flux. Moving from the tattered romanticism of Budapest, through the sparkling Dalmatian coast, and into the brutalized landscape of inland Croatia during the last days of the Balkan War, the novel takes a shocking turn of irreversible consequence.
Radiant Days is held taut in the voice of Anthony, whose desire to experience a more serious (and thrilling) life leaves injury in its wake.
The Critics:
"FitzGerald flawlessly and astutely mirrors the ennui and confusion of a generation..."
-Booklist
"...an old story, made fresh... with painful precision...."
-New York Times Sunday Book Review
"It's Graham Greene for the MySpace generation. It's a requiem for a dying American superpower. It's brilliant.."
-Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
"...a brilliant, archly funny, and painfully accurate book... "
-Hipster Book Club
"FitzGerald has crafted a gripping tale—one that speeds up as it goes along....unmistakable literary talent."
-Missoula Independent
"FitzGerald can write, and he refuses to avert his eyes."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"In many ways, Anthony's character symbolizes the face of America... Scenes of sexual cruelty and drug addiction are woven into a thoughtful if uncomfortable depiction of the spiritual bankruptcy of Americans. A gripping narrative that calls for self-examination, this is recommended for all collections."
-Library Journal
"...captures the universal ennui of Generation X in a world saturated by war. Fitzgerald skillfully shows how it transforms landscapes of earth, flesh and spirit."
-Thrive
"....a brilliant job of capturing the aimless moral hunger of this generation.... moments of beautifully lucid writing."
-Downtown Express
"Anthony is guaranteed to get under a reader’s skin, and his characterization seems an entirely accurate contemporary addition to the long literary tradition of American innocents abroad."
-New West
"...there are only so many pages of masturbation and drug-induced riffs one can take.."
-Washington Post
Advance Comments:
"Radiant Days is the darkly funny and deeply unsettling story of a young man who falls down a Central European rabbit hole. It made me squirm, and I loved it."
-Vestal McIntyre, author of You Are Not The One
"Radiant Days is a fever dream of a novel and a scathing portrait of American self-absorption, alternately rabid and indolent, and ultimately devastating."
-Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collector and About Grace
"Artfully rendering violence and its aftermath, Michael FitzGerald explores the tensions and desires among three people whose flaws beckon us to judge not them but ourselves. Through his visceral depiction of human setting, he discovers unforgettable truths about war, love, and the elusiveness of redemption."
-Elise Blackwell, author of Hunger
For more details, please visit www.radiantdays.com.
hotcakes: Radiant Days
Cover designed by Kimberly Glyder Design.
Cover photo is Gypsy Camp, Sarajevo © by Andrew Moore.
