Alone with the Owl

Alone with the Owl is a magical collection of stories, just like Rumors from the Lost World, Davis's first collection. In the two books, we meet a girl who imagines (or is she only imagining?) that she has wings, an unlikely soldier from Minnesota sent to a mythologized war in the former Yugoslavia, a minor league ballplayer who decides to committ highway robbery in the Deep South, a psychological aide who cures a schizophrenic with ketchup, a priest who has the hots for a parishioner in Fargo. The settings range from Louisiana, where the biographical notes tell us that Davis grew up, to the midwest and elsewhere. Davis writes about people from every social class and his style is a distinctive mixture of lyricism and grittiness. He's one of the best stylists now writing fiction in America. Get this book. Read it. Read it more than once. And spread the word. This is a writer to be conjured with.

His first collection, Rumors from the Lost World, was fantastic, and so the second was much anticipated. Of the first, Tim O'Brien wrote, "A magical collection of stories, one of the best I've encountered in years." Walker Percy wrote, "He has an original talent, a feel for action, a sparse yet vivid style, a sharp satirical sense, a keen eye and ear for the follies of the age." Dorothy Allison wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "Alan Davis's voice transports and sings....I kept thinking that I wouldn't mind winding up as a character in one of his stories. Odds are, he'd do me justice."The blurbs on the back cover of this new collection say it all: "Although these stories occur in many different parts of the country, they are easthetically shaped by the landscape of Louisiana, the muddy delta, and the oily bayou - the bottomland to which all things flow." Debra Marquart (The Hunger Bone) "In Alone with the Owl, I have met a glalery of characters more thoroughly and deply than I do in half a year of my ordinary existence." Josip Navakovich (Salvation and Other Disasters)