The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing

by Michael Hickins

Eleven stories told from the depths of anger, lust, and the confusion of doing the right things at the wrong times Michael Missing, the name of eleven different young men in various states of unrest, is the linked but unrelated protagonist of these wry and angry tales; a hit man, the cabin boy of nineteenth-century French pirate Jean Lafitte, erstwhile baseball hero and the man who would be president of France, and a frustrated salesman who loses an evening with Captain Kirk in the unrequited hope of laying the town slut of Scarsdale. Readers will shudder as, to their dismay, they recognize themselves, or at least part of themselves, in the naive and angry young man who sincerely wishes things were different, and who regrets he has never overheard someone say, “Michael is a real good guy.” A criminally funny and perceptive literary debut.

127 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Michael Hickins is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing (Knopf, 1991). His own adventures include helping his wife run an American eatery in France and becoming an editor at The Wall Street Journal. His work has been published in literary magazines The Quarterly, MonkeyBicycle, New Dead Families, and Sententia. He lives with his family in New York City.

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"Meditative and powerful." -- The Hartford Courant
"Wise and wryly funny tales." -- People
"Bizarre and sometimes baffling picaresque tales. [Hickins'] flip tone, gratuitous sex and violence... snide stories resemble underground comics" -- Publishers Weekly
"Outrageously inventive" -- Library Journal