Alone With the Owl (978-0898232035)
Alone with the Owl is the second prize-winning collection of short fiction from the co-editor of Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (2018), the founding co-editor of American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, and the author of Clouds Are the Mountains of the World, the newly-published and widely praised novel-in-stories set in a dystopian near-future.
"Although these stories occur in many different parts of the country, they are aesthetically shaped by the landscape of Louisiana, the muddy delta, and the oily bayou - the bottomland to which all things flow." Debra Marquart
"I kept thinking that I wouldn't mind ending up as a character in one of his stories. Odds are, he'd do me justice." -Dorothy Allison, New York Times Book Review
"Moving easily between blue-collar types and Social Register summer people, New Age dancers and Old World immigrants, underground poets and Elvis freaks, Davis demonstrates an impressive range in this collection." -Kirkus Reviews
"A magical collection of stories, one of the best I've encountered in years. It's hard to convey my enthusiasm for this book - all the ordinary adjectives of praise seem trite and inadequate. But as personal testimony, I can say tht I was tremendously moved and enlightened by each story, and that the collection as a whold lingers in my memory like a hometown - a place I once lived in and once loved." - Tim O'Brien
These 14 stories, one performed as a rock opera, another part of The Wrecking Ball (a regional multimedia event), and a third made into a short film, were first published in literary periodicals: The Quarterly, Image, ACM, Ascent, The Chattahoochee Quarterly, The Cream City Review, The Great River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, San Jose Studies, and South Dakota Review.