Background
Michael Downing was born on May 8, 1958 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, United States to the family of John Frederick Downing and Gertrude Nora Martin.
Michael Downing
Michael Downing graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with Bachelor of Arts degree in 1980.
Michael Downing graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with Bachelor of Arts degree in 1980.
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1987
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1990
(Mark Sternum is full of droll observations about the rule...)
Mark Sternum is full of droll observations about the rules that govern our language. A professor who teaches spelling and grammar at Boston's McClintock College ("An odd job for a college professor," he is told, "but no one else seems to be doing it"), he leads a diligent if somewhat detached life. Friends and family try to coax him into deeper involvement, but he keeps his lover at arm's length and screens all incoming calls - including his eccentric sister's "word pictures" about the waning days of their comatose mother.
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1997
(When Scot's mother dies, Sam and Ed, although childless a...)
When Scot's mother dies, Sam and Ed, although childless and enjoying it, decide to take him in, only to get more than they bargained for when Scot reveals his love of feather boas and expresses his dissatisfaction with the house's drapes.
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1999
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2001
(Michael Downing is obsessed with Daylight Saving, the loo...)
Michael Downing is obsessed with Daylight Saving, the loopy idea that became the most persistent political controversy in American history. Almost one hundred years after Congressmen and lawmakers in every state first debated, ridiculed, and then passionately embraced the possibility of saving an hour of daylight, no one can say for sure why we are required by law to change our clocks twice a year. Who first proposed the scheme?
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2005
(The youngest of nine children, Michael Downing was three ...)
The youngest of nine children, Michael Downing was three when his father died suddenly and inexplicably. No autopsy was performed. The family diagnosis was God’s will. As a boy, Downing rigorously trained as a spiritual athlete, preparing to vault into heaven. But eventually he escaped the religious dogma, and the family arena until one of his brothers died in 2003, suddenly and inexplicably. No autopsy was performed. Alarmed, Downing pursued a diagnosis: Drawn into a world of researchers, clinicians, and manufacturers with their own arcane ethics and faith, Downing discovered he had inherited a mutant protein from his father, and the first symptom would be his sudden death.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0044XUIDI/?tag=2022091-20
2009
(The tour Elizabeth Berman is on is better suited to her l...)
The tour Elizabeth Berman is on is better suited to her late husband, a Dante scholar who’d masterminded the itinerary as a surprise for their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary before leaving her a widow. Now she is in Italy alone, though she was itching to leave as soon as she arrived in Padua. Her efforts to book a ticket home, though, are stymied by her aggressively supportive children and the ministrations of an incomprehensibly Italian hotel staff. Then, in the Arena Chapel, she comes face to face with the first documented painting of a teardrop in human history—and in the presence of that tearful mother, and the arresting company of the renowned and anonymous women painted by Giotto, she wakes up to the possibility that she is not lost .
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2015
(This is your chance to enroll in English 10 at highly rat...)
This is your chance to enroll in English 10 at highly rated Hellman College - if you can find a place to sit in the fantastically overcrowded classroom. Mark Sternum, whom readers first met in Downing’s beloved novel Perfect Agreement, is a veteran teacher. Twenty years older, separated for six months from his longtime lover, and desperate to duck the overtures of double-dealing deans above him and disgruntled adjunct faculty below him, Mark has one ambition every day he is on campus - to close the classroom door and leave the world behind. His escape, however, is complicated by his contentious, complicated wrestling match of a relationship with the Professor, the tenured faculty member with whom Mark has co-taught this creative-writing workshop for ten years. The spectacle of their rigorous, academic relationship is a chance for students - all of us - to learn what an amazing arena the classroom can be.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DFHZ844/?tag=2022091-20
2019
Michael Downing was born on May 8, 1958 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, United States to the family of John Frederick Downing and Gertrude Nora Martin.
Michael Downing graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with Bachelor of Arts degree in 1980.
Michael Downing worked as a contributing editor for the Italian art monthly FMR, the science journal Oceanus, and Harvard Magazine. In addition to his books, he has written two plays, premiered by the Triangle Theater of Boston and San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre. His essays and reviews appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, as well as Smithsonian, Huffington Post, and other online periodicals.
Michael’s nonfiction includes Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center, hailed by the New York Review of Books as a “dramatic and insightful” narrative history of the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia, and by the Los Angeles Times as “a highly readable book, important for the healing it invites in giving voice to the thoughts and feelings of Zen Center members who have remained silent until now.” He wrote a memoir, Life with Sudden Death: A Tale of Moral Hazard and Medical Misadventures, a cautionary tale about a genetic diagnosis and the dangers he encountered at the frontiers of modern medicine.
Michael Downing teaches creative writing at Tufts University. He and Peter Bryant live together in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
(When Scot's mother dies, Sam and Ed, although childless a...)
1999(The tour Elizabeth Berman is on is better suited to her l...)
2015(This is your chance to enroll in English 10 at highly rat...)
2019(Michael Downing is obsessed with Daylight Saving, the loo...)
2005(The youngest of nine children, Michael Downing was three ...)
2009(Mark Sternum is full of droll observations about the rule...)
1997
