Brian Doyle was a one-of-a-kind author who wrote one-of-a-kind prayers about everyday subjects that help readers change the way they see the world.Prayers for cashiers and good shoes; for shorter sermons and better senators; prayers for the bruised, foolish, glorious, stumbling, brilliant Church; for chaplains and mathematicians; for idiot authors and muddy dogs: These are the most heartfelt and headlong prayers you will ever read and share—the grinning, snarling prayers we mouth q...

In a small fictional town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There's a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman who is addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer, and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime is committed, and there's an unbelievabl...

"An affectionate homage," this novel of Stevenson's evolution into an adventure writer is "a loving reconstruction of an era of storytelling now lost" ( New York Times).The young Robert Louis Stevenson, living in a boarding house in San Francisco in the nineteenth century while waiting for his beloved's divorce from her feckless husband, dreamed of writing a soaring novel about his landlady's adventurous and globe-trotting husband, John Carson—but he never ...

Brian Doyle himself explains it best: “A few years ago I was moaning to my wry gentle dad that basketball, which seems to me inarguably the most graceful and generous and swift and fluid and ferociously-competitive-without-being-sociopathic of sports, has not produced rafts of good books, like baseball and golf and cricket and surfing have . . . Where are the great basketball novels to rival The Natural and the glorious Mark Harris baseball quartet and the great Bernard Darwin’s golf stori...

A must-read for anyone who grew up in America during the 50s and 60s.Revenge on a teacher. Saturday nights at the Drive-In. Fast cars, midnight shopping, and teenage sex. You’ll recognize the characters. They might have had different names in your town, but the escapades are universal. Relive your teen years with Brian, Marsha, Fusco, and the gang from Norwalk.

Brian Doyle might just be the most passionate storyteller in America. In this eclectic and compelling collection of stories Doyle writes about his discovery of the incarnated Spirit of God every time he turns around, often in the most unlikely of people, places, and things. In 37 short snapshots, he captures the spiritual essence of everyday life from the perspective of a committed Catholic who loves his faith, his family, his community, and his church, even with all their warts and failin...

A playful and moving book of essays by a "born storyteller" (Seattle Times) who invites us into the miraculous and transcendent moments of the everydayWhen Brian Doyle passed away at the age of sixty after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted readers who regard his writing as one of the best-kept secrets of the twenty-first century. Doyle writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the sanctity of everyday things, an...

When Ryan's dad runs away from home because of the change of life, Ryan is sent to spend the summer with his aunt in Peggy's Cove.He goes fishing, almost gets into big trouble and learns a lot about tourist behavior, but most of all he misses his dad and hopes he'll come back soon.

Declan O Donnell has sailed out of Oregon and deep into the vast, wild ocean, having had just finally enough of other people and their problems. He will go it alone, he will be his own country, he will be beholden to and beloved of no one. No man is an island, my butt, he thinks. I am that very man. . . .But the galaxy soon presents him with a string of odd, entertaining, and dangerous passengers, who become companions of every sort and stripe. The Plo...

This lyrical tale of a young man's first foray into adulthood offers "a moving ode to the city of Chicago and the singular nature of its people" ( Booklist, starred review)On the last day of summer, a young college grad moves to Chicago and rents a small apartment on the north side of the city, by the lake. This is the story of the five seasons he lives there in the late 1970s, during which he meets gangsters, gamblers, policemen, a brave and garrulous bus ...

In this remarkable collection of essays, acclaimed writer Brian Doyle offers “resurrections, restorations, reconsiderations, appreciations, enthusiasms, headlong solos, laughing prayers, imaginary meetings with most unusual and most interesting men.”Geographically and chronologically diverse-Plutarch of Greece; William Blake of England; Robert Louis Stevenson of Scotland; James Joyce and Van Morrison of Ireland; and others-Doyle sees them as men of “immense spiritual substance, pra...

Proems, taut tales, small stories with rhythm and blues and grace and bruise and laughter between the lines. Brian Doyle’s The Kind of Brave You Wanted to Be is a book of cadenced notes on the swirl of miracle and the holy of attentiveness; a book about children and birds, love and grief and everything alive, which is to say all prayers.