Coming Soon!
I CAN OUTDANCE JESUS: SHORT STORIES
BY WILLIE DAVIS
Order Here!
A country singer determined to write a song so offensive it will destroy Nashville. Two friends pretend to be Mormon so they can terrorize a small town. A child tries to turn himself into a vampire while his family collapses around him. A man writes prospective suicide notes for all his friends. The characters in I Can Outdance Jesus go on bizarre and unforgettable adventures, taking them from the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. The strangeness and humor of the mountains comes alive in these stories of reprobates, grifters, drunks, and manipulators who are trying to wring out whatever self-destructive joy they can from their particular slice of America.
PRAISE FOR I CAN OUTDANCE JESUS
“This is an over-the-top collection of stories, filled with outlandish characters who brazenly cross all lines of taboo and propriety. The batch offers lots of adventurous reading, but it isn't mere shock. While satire is richly on the table, these often hilarious and sloppy-on-purpose stories are mirror reflections of reality in southern Appalachia, and maybe all of America, given our fraught history. If human experience weren't so tragic, it could run the risk of being funny. That's the line the stories in this fine collection walk, a very sharp one.”
–Maurice Manning, author of The Common Man, finalist for the Pulitzer in Poetry
“Davis writes about the South, and especially rural Kentucky, in an unflinching way that weaves together humor and the darknesses of poverty, violence, addiction, and despair. His characters are often men in trouble who are smart enough to know that and stuck enough in their own perspectives and circumstances not to be able to change it. An unsentimental, wise-cracking collection about meeting hardship with a wink for readers of George Singleton, Denis Johnson, and Mark Richard.”
–Cara Blue Adams, author of You Never Get It Back
“Willie Davis is a blasphemous believer with as much heart as imagination and a trickster’s gift for slantwise truth-telling. I Can Outdance Jesus—populated with ruckus-raising, bullshit-calling, ghost-ravaged storytellers—is its own glorious world with roots in eastern Kentucky. “Anyone who speaks in my accent grew up primed for destructions,” the book begins, on behalf of all its characters who, as Eudora Welty puts it, “sing true.” Davis is writing in Welty’s lineage though there’s as much Percival Everett and Frank Stafford here as Welty, and Davis’s magnificent song is very much his own.”
–Maud Casey, author of City Of Incurable Women, The Man Who Walked Away, and Drastic
I CAN OUTDANCE JESUS: SHORT STORIES
BY WILLIE DAVIS
Order Here!
A country singer determined to write a song so offensive it will destroy Nashville. Two friends pretend to be Mormon so they can terrorize a small town. A child tries to turn himself into a vampire while his family collapses around him. A man writes prospective suicide notes for all his friends. The characters in I Can Outdance Jesus go on bizarre and unforgettable adventures, taking them from the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. The strangeness and humor of the mountains comes alive in these stories of reprobates, grifters, drunks, and manipulators who are trying to wring out whatever self-destructive joy they can from their particular slice of America.
PRAISE FOR I CAN OUTDANCE JESUS
“This is an over-the-top collection of stories, filled with outlandish characters who brazenly cross all lines of taboo and propriety. The batch offers lots of adventurous reading, but it isn't mere shock. While satire is richly on the table, these often hilarious and sloppy-on-purpose stories are mirror reflections of reality in southern Appalachia, and maybe all of America, given our fraught history. If human experience weren't so tragic, it could run the risk of being funny. That's the line the stories in this fine collection walk, a very sharp one.”
–Maurice Manning, author of The Common Man, finalist for the Pulitzer in Poetry
“Davis writes about the South, and especially rural Kentucky, in an unflinching way that weaves together humor and the darknesses of poverty, violence, addiction, and despair. His characters are often men in trouble who are smart enough to know that and stuck enough in their own perspectives and circumstances not to be able to change it. An unsentimental, wise-cracking collection about meeting hardship with a wink for readers of George Singleton, Denis Johnson, and Mark Richard.”
–Cara Blue Adams, author of You Never Get It Back
“Willie Davis is a blasphemous believer with as much heart as imagination and a trickster’s gift for slantwise truth-telling. I Can Outdance Jesus—populated with ruckus-raising, bullshit-calling, ghost-ravaged storytellers—is its own glorious world with roots in eastern Kentucky. “Anyone who speaks in my accent grew up primed for destructions,” the book begins, on behalf of all its characters who, as Eudora Welty puts it, “sing true.” Davis is writing in Welty’s lineage though there’s as much Percival Everett and Frank Stafford here as Welty, and Davis’s magnificent song is very much his own.”
–Maud Casey, author of City Of Incurable Women, The Man Who Walked Away, and Drastic