Brian Doyle has written a supberly intriguing novel... What if a man who lost his foot in a war decades ago, many years later was to find it again? “It was a good foot, and we parted so hurriedly I never had a chance to really think about it as a foot, so off I went…” So begins this lean little novel – a quest, a wandering, a contemplation of the immense foolishness of war. Terse but filled with adventure and wonder, Cat’s Foot is surely the most unusual fiction you will read this year – or perhaps any year… “Along Cat's implausible journey to find something impossible to find, you hear him say things you never heard before, told in ways that make you marvel. Cat's eyes have seen everything it seems. Forgotten nothing.” – Bill Gunlocke, Editor, a city reader
Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. He is the author of twelve books, among them the novel Mink River, the short story collection Bin Laden’s Bald Spot, and the essay collection Grace Notes. Among the more astounding and puzzling honors for his work are the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ 2008 Award in Literature, and the University of Notre Dame’s Father Robert Griffin Award for Writing, in 2010. That award earned him a free steak dinner, which he remembers fondly.
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Author
Doyle's essays and poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The American Scholar, Orion, Commonweal, and The Georgia Review, among other magazines and journals, and in The Times of London, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Kansas City Star, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Ottawa Citizen, and Newsday, among other newspapers. He was a book reviewer for The Oregonian and a contributing essayist to both Eureka Street magazine and The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia. Doyle's essays have also been reprinted in: * the Best American Essays anthologies of 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2005; * in Best Spiritual Writing 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2005; and * in Best Essays Northwest (2003); * and in a dozen other anthologies and writing textbooks. As for awards and honors, he had three startling children, an incomprehensible and fascinating marriage, and he was named to the 1983 Newton (Massachusetts) Men's Basketball League all-star team, and that was a really tough league. Doyle delivered many dozens of peculiar and muttered speeches and lectures and rants about writing and stuttering grace at a variety of venues, among them Australian Catholic University and Xavier College (both in Melbourne, Australia), Aquinas Academy (in Sydney, Australia); Washington State, Seattle Pacific, Oregon, Utah State, Concordia, and Marylhurst universities; Boston, Lewis & Clark, and Linfield colleges; the universities of Utah, Oregon, Pittsburgh, and Portland; KBOO radio (Portland), ABC and 3AW radio (Australia); the College Theology Society; National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," and in the PBS film Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero (2002). Doyle was a native of New York, was fitfully educated at the University of Notre Dame, and was a magazine and newspaper journalist in Portland, Boston, and Chicago for more than twenty years. He was living in Portland, Oregon, with his family when died at age 60 from complications related to a brain tumor.
