Bin Laden's Bald Spot & Other Stories
“Virginia Woolf addressed what she called the Common Reader—Brian Doyle doesn’t have any of those. His readers turn instantly and preternaturally uncommon, seeing and feeling and noticing and knowing what they have never before taken in: a kind of laughing piercing antic holiness. To read Brian Doyle is to apprehend, all at once, the force that drives Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman, and James Joyce, and Emily Dickinson, and Francis of Assisi, and Jonah under his gourd. Brian Doyle is an extraordinary writer whose tales will endure. The sublime ‘Waking the Bishop’ is going to inhabit American anthologies forever and ever.”—Cynthia Ozick“Brian Doyle has a fine quick mind alert for anomaly and quirk-none of them beyond his agile pen.”—Peter Matthiessen“No one writes prose with the verve and honesty, the gusto and wit of Brian Doyle.”—Pattiann Rogers“Some people can write. Some people can feel. Brian Doyle, born with a  silver tongue and a big heart, is among the lucky few who can do both.”—Anne Fadiman“What I like about Brian Doyle’s writing is that it’s real—it’s got  mud and blood and tears but it’s also got earthly angels who teach him  to grasp on to each small epiphany as it opens before him.”—Martin Flanagan“Brian Doyle’s writing is driven by his passion for the human,  touchable, daily life, and equally for the untouchable mystery of all  else… his gratitude, his sweet lyrical reaching, is a gift to us all.”—Mary Oliver