Lauren Davis's Guide to Books + Booze

 

Time to grab a book and get tipsy!!!

Books & Booze challenges participating authors to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist. 

Today we have LaurenDavis joining us with a drink to promote her most recent release, the short story collection The Nothing (YesYes Books). She is also the author of the poetry collection Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press), the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize short-listed When I Drowned, and three chapbooks. She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Her fiction won the Landing Zone Magazine’s Flash Fiction Contest and her fiction and poetry have been finalists for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, among others. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous literary publications and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, Spillway, Poet Lore, Ibbetson Street, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, and she has taught at The Writers’ Workshoppe, Adirondack Center for Writing, BARN Bainbridge, Writing Workshops, and Hugo House. Davis lives with her husband on the Olympic Peninsula in a Victorian seaport community.

The following drink recipe is inspired by the story "The Bright":

 

The Virgin Ghost

 

Flavored seltzer     |      Jasmine water to taste     |     Edible metallic dust

“The Bright,” the fourth story in my collection The Nothing (YesYes Books), is a piece about what it means to be haunted—by memories, by emotions, by obsession. Skye, the main character, is allergic to the sun, and the roots of her affliction stem from a secret that keeps her isolated in her minute, shadowed world. Nightly, to keep herself occupied, she bathes in milk, plays Scrabble with a ghost. Her isolation is pierced only by the town’s new baker, who seems to have his own secrets. To get close to him, though, Skye much make herself vulnerable in ways she has spent years avoiding.

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Released May 2025

Purchase your copy here

The Nothing, Lauren Davis’s debut fiction collection, exists on the whisper between reality and illusion. Think Shirley Jackson's characters stuck in the damp Pacific Northwest or an Olympic Peninsula funhouse mirror held up to Karen Russell's Florida. The worlds Davis creates acknowledge the terror and seek the gifts of solitude, grief, and the unrelenting thirst for certainty within us all.

"There are ghosts in these stories. Sometimes literal, other times only in metaphor or feeling, but ever present in every story in Lauren Davis’s The Nothing is something just off page, under the surface, aching and yearning and pulling and haunting every sharp, minimal, perfect sentence, not unlike the way these stories themselves will get their hooks in you and keep haunting long after you’ve put it down."

—Aaron Burch, author of Year of the Buffalo