“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
