welcome

Thanks for visiting my website.

You may also wish to visit my blog, VIEW FROM THE LIBRARY WINDOW.

Please take a look around using the links on the right hand side of the page. You'll find news here about my appearances, teaching and new publications, as well as some essays I've written in the "journal" section.

If you would like to contact me, please do so by using the form on the "contact" page.

I am most grateful to Joy Stocke at the terrific Wild River Review, for asking me to write an essay on the suicide deaths of both my brothers, Bernie and Ronnie. This is the anniversary week of their deaths. The essay is called "April is the Cruelest Month" and if you would like to read it, please visit www.WildRiverreview.com. And a blessed Easter/Passover to everyone.

AN UNREHEARSED DESIRE, Lauren's new short story collection, is now available. You can purchase it either through the publisher, Exile Editions, by clicking here,, or through Amazon.ca by clicking here.

FROM THE PUBLISHER: "The fourteen stories in this dazzling collection continue acclaimed author Lauren B. Davis' exploration into her characters' psychological landscapes, and ensure her reputation as a writer of razor-sharp intellect and deep compassion. Weaving these stories together is the notion that what one wants and what one needs is not always the same thing: a tale of a heart-broken father coming to terms with the drug-overdose death of his son; a child who must choose between the safety of her mother's controlling over-indulgence and the wider, more dangerous world; a young girl outsmarting a pedophile during what she calls "the summer of naked men;" to a brilliant but socially awkward woman who deals with betrayal by taking on the persona of a bear... Davis hits the nail on the head each and every time.

REVIEW:

Spare, elegant stories highlight humanity

Reviewed by Bev Sandell Greenberg, The Winnipeg Free Press

An Unrehearsed Desire

WHAT happens to our unfulfilled desires? And what if they differ from our needs?

In her second collection of short stories, Canadian literary writer Lauren B. Davis tackles these questions, exploring the emotional landscape of fear, anger, loneliness and betrayal.

Though the situations she describes are commonplace, Davis's passion for her characters makes them achingly real.

Thematically, her fourth book marks somewhat of a departure from her previous focus on mental illness. Her 2002 debut novel, The Stubborn Season, deals with a young woman in 1930s Toronto whose mother suffers from depression.

Her followup, The Radiant City (a 2005 Rogers' Trust Fiction Prize nominee) centres on a journalist suffering from post-traumatic stress after postings in several war zones.

Born in Montreal, Davis currently lives in Princeton. N.J,, where she serves as the writer-in-residence at Trinity Church. Both her parents both grew up Winnipeg.

These stories, written in spare, elegant prose, feature a variety of protagonists, male and female, young and old.

Several stories centre on marital discord. Gestures tells about a Canadian couple living in Paris. The wife is forced to examine her marriage after she and her husband spend a disastrous evening with clients. Reprised from Davis's debut collection of the same title, Rat Medicine is a powerful and suspenseful tale describing the efforts of a First Nations woman to extricate herself from her marriage.

In the title story, a menopausal housewife shoplifts at a love boutique and gets more than she bargained for. Other stories focus on the stormy relationships between children and their parents.

It Could Be Serious describes a socially inept teenager who spends weeks at home with scarlet fever, only to endure taunting by her classmates when she finally sees them again.

In Dirty Money, a 10-year-old girl loses her innocence over the course of a summer as a result of her aunt's visit and several chance encounters with pedophiles.

The six-year-old narrator of In the Memory House receives a coming home gift from her father, and confronts a lie about it many years later.

Throughout the book, Davis writes with a stunning clarity and economy of words. Her keen ear for dialogue is also evident. Her fly-on-the-wall accounts scratch beneath the surface, revealing each character, warts and all.

In the words of the late American writer David Foster Wallace, "fiction is about what it is to be a human being." Davis does much to affirm that statement.

Bev Sandell Greenberg is a Winnipeg writer and teacher.

THE RADIANT CITY Lauren's latest novel, THE RADIANT CITY (HarperCanada), was shortlisted for the WRITERS TRUST OF CANADA ROGER'S FICTION PRIZE. For those of you who do not live in Canada, you can also order from Amazon.ca.

FROM THE PUBLISHER: "Light is neutral and indifferent. It can blind as well as reveal. It can save someone who wanders too close to an unseen edge, but it can just as easily betray a person cowering in a hidden place." . . . So thinks Matthew Bowles, as he stares out his Paris window at the sun sparkling off a tiny fountain in the place du Dublin in the 8th arrondissement. Matthew, a traumatized war correspondent, has fled to the anonymity of Paris after himself becoming an international story for a failed act of heroism. He has been offered a book contract, but the ghosts of his past threaten to overtake him as he struggles to write his memoirs. In a city of refugees, Matthew is a refugee from reality, as homeless as those whose shattered lives he records. Matthew resurrects a friendship with Jack Saddler -- Vetnam vet, ex-mercenary, and sometime combat photographer -- and is drawn into Jack's world of shadowy bars, calculating lovers, and booze-fuelled nights of forgetting. But he is also befriended by Saida, the beautiful, scarred woman who fled Lebanon with her family and now runs a café on the place du Dublin. Matthew is drawn in by her kindness and her fierce love for Joseph, her sixteen-year-old son, who is growing into manhood on the treacherous streets of the North African quarter. This is Paris far from the glimmer of tourist lights. It is here that secrets are divulged, guilt and passion are revealed, and Matthew is caught up in an inescapable final confrontation. Shining light into the no-man's-land of war zones, Paris's unseen quarters, and the darkest corners of the human mind and heart, Lauren B. Davis delivers a novel of astonishing depth and power. The Radiant City is the story of a man rediscovering his humanity and the necessity of participating in life rather than simply observing it.