“Michael Coffey brings us so close to his subjects it is almost embarrassing. Whether he’s writing about a sinning priest or a man who’s made a career out of branding or about himself, we can smell Coffey’s protagonists and feel their breath on our cheek. Like Chekhov, he must be a notebook writer; how else to explain the strange quirks and the perfect but unaccountable details that animate these intimate portraits?”

“Sherwood Anderson would recognize this world of lonely, longing characters, whose surface lives Coffey tenderly plumbs. These beautiful stories—spare, rich, wise and compelling—go to the heart.”

“Once I started reading these stories, I couldn’t stop. They absorbed me thoroughly, with their taut narratives and evocative language—the language of a poet. The matter of identity looms over them, giving them a kind of brooding and breeding presence, one that animates the past, makes it not only real, but more than real. Michael Coffey has reached deep into his own past here, but that reality has been magically transformed, transmogrified, as the work of fiction does its job. Coffey is a fine, witty, and vibrant writer. I recommend The Business of Naming Things with gratitude to the author.”

“Coffey name-drops some serious literary heavyweights in the pages of his stories. Harold Brodkey, J.F. Powers, Henrik Ibsen and James Joyce all make an appearance. But that doesn’t mean that these stories are only for ‘pointy-headed’ literary types. Coffey’s writing hearkens back to stylists of 40 or 50 years ago and his subject matter is ‘meat and potatoes’ basic: the relationships between men and women and fathers and sons.”

“Michael Coffey is a writer who revels in language and in storytelling. In this group of beguiling short stories, the writing is rich, subtle, and often surprising.”

“Well-crafted stories, thick with literary references. . . . Carefully chiseled. . . Sober and smart writing that evokes the more mannered American stylists of the 1960s and ’70s.”

“Riveting. . . . Coffey brilliantly examines the efforts of a mother to cope with her son’s death in ‘Moon Over Quabbin’; he uses the J.F.K. assassination as a backdrop to a tale about a sinful priest in ‘Inn of the Nations’; and, in ‘Sons,’ he explores a difficult father-son relationship in the context of a possible Obama assassination attempt. . . . Vibrant and unsparing.”

“Superb. . . . Startlingly original and at times darkly funny. . . . [Coffey’s] characters are as flawed and complicated as they are recognizable and sympathetic; all fiction readers can enjoy.”