Michael Deagler is a fiction writer who came up through short stories and literary magazines before his first novel. His work has appeared in Harper's, Kenyon Review Online, New England Review and Electric Literature's Recommended Reading. He is also an alumnus of the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden, and he has written criticism and interviews for The Millions.
His subject so far is recovery, treated without a sermon. Early Sobrieties centers on Dennis Monk, 26, seven months sober and trying to return to the Bucks County, Pennsylvania community he left. His years of drinking and bar work have given him a wary, funny view of a changing Philadelphia. Deagler has said he began the book when he had been sober for two years and was using fiction to work through his own experience. Reviewers have singled out the comedy as much as the candor. In the New York Times Book Review, Charlie Lee praised it as a comic meditation on how untidy a life is when you try to give it a plot.
The novel was published in 2024 by Astra House in the United States and by Hutchinson Heinemann in the United Kingdom. It won the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and was longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. The book's route to print was slow. An earlier version found no publisher, but a chapter ran in Harper's as the story 'New Poets', which an Astra House editor read and acted on.
Start with Early Sobrieties. It is his only novel to date and the book that brought him wide recognition. It is a good fit if you like narrators who are honest about their own evasions, or if you read Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son and want something from a later generation.
