Distributed by YesYes Books and Ingram
Cover Art by Todd Hildo
Cover & Interior Design by Olivia M. Hammerman
Author Photo: Maegan Gray
$18 | 156 pages | ISBN: 978-1-946303-05-9
Fiction l Perfectbound | May 27, 2025
Praise for The Nothing by Lauren Davis
Lauren Davis has written such unnerving stories and characters that one wants to watch them unfold even after their final turn, evoking Bergman or Lynch.
—Luke Goebel, author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours
The stories in The Nothing harbor ghosts, mountain views, movie theatres, and haunting pastorals to create a world that is both modern and eternal as fable. Davis’s landscapes feel as fully inhabited as the magnificent, occasionally grotesque dreamscapes the narrators lead us into, the surreal grounded in the startlingly real. Rich with vivid details and the subtle intimacies of life, this book traverses slowly and bravely into the dark, flickering with flame and sifting through the ashes of grief to tell “graciously human” stories.
—Erin Slaughter, author of A Manual for How to Love Us and The Sorrow Festival
Praise for When I Drowned by Lauren Davis
I can't think of another book I've read that so moved me to reconsider all I feel-all I believe-heart and mind-about love and loss and the timeless linkages that join us through action and consequence to one another.
—Gary Lemons, author of Snake
Unique and powerful, this book, the images and stories within, will linger like a chill.
—Michael Schmeltzer, author of Empire of Surrender
Praise for Home Beneath the Church by Lauren Davis
With its incantations about how a woman resides within the (un)holy rooms of her body’s longings and belongings, Home Beneath the Church crafts a home, a sanctuary, for any reader to cohabitate with the language of the prismatic familial and sacred. I am grateful now to be able to visit Davis’s debut abode.
—Sandra Yannone, author of Boats for Women
I am forever in awe of her work.
—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides
The Nothing
The Nothing is available to PreOrder at 20% off!
from “Tastes Like Rat”
We were two sallow sweethearts on a sea of salted sheets, floating through fever and shadows. We ate each other’s laments. A sun came up, snickering at the heat it spilled into that illicit sickroom. We could hide from nothing, especially the moon, who made us nauseous, and thirsty, and a little savage. Who stayed past its welcome. I pulled the blinds, but when I turned my back, they were peeled away again and I would clutch them together then lie on the sea exhausted and still he slept and still the sun fell about mocking and tapping at the glass. I would say we ate, but I am not convinced that’s true. If he awoke it was only to ask to be held.
About the book
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.
About the author
LAUREN DAVIS is the author of the short story collection The Nothing (YesYes Books, 2025) and the poetry collections Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press) and When I Drowned (Kelsay Books). 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.
