Short stories from an author with "a roomy imagination, big appetite for the absurd, healthy sense of humor, [and] heightened sense for the telling detail" (Telegraph-Journal). The elderly take to the streets at night for illegal and cathartic electric scooter racing. A copy editor suffers brain damage from West Nile virus and is suddenly filled with cannibalistic violence and award-winning minimalist poetry. Mayor McCheese visits a sexually repressed British couple in the early 1970s and touches their lives forever. A Texas doctor transplants the mind of a meth-addicted convict into the body of a suburban web developer. Startlingly original, marked by vivid characters and a rich pop-culture sensibility, the short fiction in Ronald Reagan, My Father offer a bleakly hilarious vision that''s both human and uncanny.
Deliciously wicked satires about local and international celebrities, the poems in Portable Altamont evince an irrepressible grasp of the zeitgeist, its machinations and manipulations, its possibilities and puerility. Who other than artist and raconteur Brian Joseph Davis could have imagined Margaret Atwood as a human beatbox, Jessica Simpson applying for arts grants or the Swedish Chef reciting T. S. Eliot? Davis uses every literary form available to revel in and rearrange pop culture. Even the index turns into a short story about Luke Perry's descent into a shadowy underworld of Parisian intellectuals and terrorists. A word of warning: this book is a complete and utter fiction. Philip Roth is not David Lee Roth's brother. Reese Witherspoon is not a Communist cell leader, and Don Knotts has never been a New Age guru. The stuff about Nicole Richie, however, is absolutely true. Portable Altamont is that rare book that is both incendiary and compulsively readable. Get to it before the lawyers do!