Friday Favorites: The Hands of Strangers

Mississippi's First Alumnae Association would like to congratulate MUW, Assistant Professor of English at MUW on the publication of his book, The Hands of Strangers.  

Early reviews have been positive:

“Michael F. Smith’s The Hands of Strangers is a remarkable achievement, a tortured novel that combines a delicately drawn Paris in winter with a too-common event these days, the vanished child. Here the loss is striking and potent, filling the reader with fear and making the impossible-to-imagine wrenchingly clear and present. The writing is first rate, the story is chilling, a warning for us all, maybe even a threat reminding us how far off our game we can get without really knowing it, and how hard it might be to get back to where we started.  A remarkable first novel from a truly gifted young writer.” -Frederick Barthelme, author of Elroy Nights and Waveland

 

“Michael F. Smith uses language like brushstrokes, building layers of rich textures and smooth contours in The Hands of Strangers. His characters navigate the familiar and the new, along Paris streets as well as the ever-changing emotional landscape. Smith achieves a finely wrought mix of momentum and weight that fuels the desire of the characters to search for answers and the desire of his readers will surely feel to follow the journey.”

-Ravi Howard, author of Like Trees, Walking

 

“The Hands of Strangers is a beautiful novel about the worst nightmare a parent can experience. When Jon and Estelle’s daughter vanishes in Paris, they try to survive the days, weeks, and months in their own ways, dealing with their own secrets and questions, both wondering: Can hope alone change anything? Michael F. Smith has captured what happens when a lovely and familiar city becomes terrible and strange, and when a relationship is tested by devastating uncertainty. This is a page-turner that will make you want to slow down to savor the writing and stay with these characters longer.”

-Becky Hagenston, author of Strange Weather and A Gram of Mars, and winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction.

Click here to purchase.

About the Author:

Michael F. Smith is a native Mississippian who has lived throughout the Southeast and spent considerable time living abroad in France and Switzerland. He has been awarded the Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the Transatlantic Review Award for Fiction, the Alabama Arts Council Fellowship Award for Literature, and the Brick Streets Press Short Story Award. His short fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous literary reviews and anthologies. He has been invited to read his work at multiple venues, from Boston to Manhattan to Montrichard, France. His first novel, The Hands of Strangers, is now available from Main Street Rag Publishing in Charlotte, North Carolina.

He attended Mississippi State University and later the Center for Writers at Southern Miss. In between, he took his first job with the NBA, working with its outdoor streetball festival, Hoop-It-Up. After only a few months in Dallas, he jumped at the opportunity to move to Western Europe and work on the road crew with the European version of Hoop-It-Up. Over the next few years, he traveled extensively in Western Europe, working in and visiting the countries of France, Italy, Spain, England, Germany, Greece, Denmark, Switzerland, and more. It was during this time, riding the trains, and spending evenings at his apartment without the luxury of television, that he began to read, and read some more. Which then led to the idea that he’d like to try and write some of his own stories.

His own work is naturally influenced by Southern writers. Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, Tim Gautreaux, Tom Franklin, Barry Hannah, William Faulkner, and so on. Like most writers, his beginnings focused on the short story, but in the last few years he has turned towards the novel and The Hands of Strangers is his first published novel.

He lives in Columbus, Mississippi, with his wife and two daughters, in a self-renovated Victorian home that was built in 1878. He teaches creative writing at Mississippi University for Women.