Introducing … 

Gravity

A new collection of short stories published in April 2009 from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

Although the stories in Gravity operate from the perspective of male speakers, the experiences they describe are as much about women as men.  Bound up in them is the assumption that everything in life depends on being solvent, employed, and generally needed.  These things constitute the gravity, or the seriousness, of one’s situation—that which holds a person’s life together and makes it mean something. 

Praise for Gravity:

One of the stories in Michael Davis’s GRAVITY is titled “Living in It,” and that could be a subtext for this entire compelling collection. The characters speak  from a place of total immersion in their various strange, comic and wholly credible situations, but while their tangled-up-in-blueness might be overwhelming, their perception remains  droll and clear, and that’s the  beauty of this excellent first book: its singular underlying vision—highly observant, detailed, tight, solid— that adapts to each individual story and makes from them a whole.

- Stuart Dybek

In Michael Davis’s world, everyone is “joyfully terrified.” A whimsical alienation permeates the lives of people who struggle to awaken from the American Dream, and, failing, languish nobly, if absurdly, in the nightmare clutter of their lives. A generation finds one of its truly unique and powerful voices in this debut collection. 

- Richard Katrovas

Michael Davis writes like a Nabokov who has never had a decent job, a Philip Roth of the low end of the service economy. His desperately funny narrators are rich in language but poor in everything else. Voice — supple, grimy, demotic, exasperated, complex yet brilliantly natural and alive — is the miracle of these stories, which are finally not like anyone else’s. Davis is such an original fashioner of voice in fiction that he seems to have reinvented the medium. A Michael Davis hero never met a job he didn’t loathe, for good reason. Davis is the best interpreter to date of the ubiquitous humiliations of the early twenty-first century world of work. His protagonists almost long to believe the cant of self-improvement they are offered on every side, but finally their nerves for absurdity are too finely tuned. These are essential stories for their generation and for all of us who live as best we can by words.

- Jaimy Gordon

 … and see the discussion of the book by Storyglossia editor, Steven J. McDermott, on the Storyglossia blog.