The Knack of Doing

The Knack of Doing is the debut collection of short fiction by Jeremy M. Davies, author of the acclaimed indie novels Rose Alley (2009) and Fancy (2015). Playful, fantastical, gruesome, and tender by turns, these stories run 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 brain-teasers. "The Excise-Man" pastiches Robert Burns and Flann O'Brien in a rowdy tale of moonshine and tax evasion, while "Forkhead Box" catalogs the profesional and personal embarrassments of a New York State executioner in the days of the Rosenbergs. Finally, the epic novella "Delete the Marquis" looks back to pulp fiction and the Victorian penny dreadful in chronicling the woes of a ghostwriter who may inadvertently be perverting the world with his lack of imagination. Overflowing with "wit, irresistible ingenuity, and a stupefying narrative abundance" (Harry Mathews), Davies' fiction takes dead aim at literary convention while reimagining the art of storytelling for the twenty-first century.