The Knack of Doing: Stories

Perverse, playful, and highly comic stories that take dead aim at fictional convention.Playful, fantastical, gruesome, and tender by turns, this debut collection of short fiction by Jeremy M. Davies runs the gamut from parody to tragedy and back. "Sad White People" follows a souring hipster love affair that finds itself brutally hijacked by a far more interesting story, while "The Terrible Riddles of Human Sexuality (Solved)" introduces us to a dominatrix whose life is splintered into a series of children's brainteasers. "The Excise-Man" pastiches Robert Burns and Flann O'Brien in a rowdy tale of moonshine and tax evasion, while "Forkhead Box" catalogs the professional and personal embarrassments of a New York State executioner in the days of the Rosenbergs. Finally, the epic "Delete the Marquis" looks back to the nineteenth-century novel, chronicling the woes of an impecunious ghostwriter who has inadvertently turned the entire world into a lurid fiction. Overflowing with "wit, irresistible ingenuity, and a stupefying narrative abundance" (Harry Mathews), Davies's fiction takes dead aim at literary convention while reimagining the art of storytelling for the twenty-first century.