“Girl” Named a Best New Winter Book

Outstanding! The snazzy and smart web magazine, Daily Candy, has named “Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo” one of the Best New Winter Books. Read their nice appraisal, as well as intriguing descriptions of the other new novels, HERE.

Bean and I Delighted, Apparently, Which is Nice to Hear

Here’s a writeup of a recent reading, featuring me and my friend and poetic colleague Jeffrey Bean, at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids. Kudos to writer Dan Michniewicz for all the good details!

There was a terrific turnout, incidentally. And the University Club, located on GVSU’s downtown campus, is a beautiful venue. Cool guy and terrific writer Austin Bunn set up the event. Much appreciation to everyone who turned out!

“Girl” Featured on Free Book Friday!

There’s a short interview about The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo. I liked the questions a lot — they were fun to answer. Check it out here.

Reading tonight in Kalamazoo!

I’m excited to be reading and signing books in the very city that Audrey Mapes devoured ten years ago. I’ll be at Kazoo Books (on Parkview) tonight at 5:30pm! Full details can be found here.

Another great review!

I just found this!  It’s a blog called Hungry Brain.

Thanks, Hungry Brain!

Great Review in Manhattan Mercury!

Here is a very complimentary review from last Sunday’s paper.  Thank you, Steven Miller!

And here’s the second page:

A cartoon

A cartoon

Up and Running

Well, now this is my “official” site, linked to the previously used www.darrindoyle.com URL.  Thanks to my good friend P for fixing it up.  P is also the force behind an awesome noise band called Paranoid Time that you should check out.

The Sunday edition of The Manhattan Mercury just reviewed The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo, but since they have no online edition, I’m waiting for the hard copy in the mail.  I’ll post it soon!

Also, my book is going to be profiled on Free Book Friday in the near future…stay tuned…

Hot dog!

So my darrindoyle.com website is no longer being updated regularly, due to unforeseen circumstances.  I’m working on getting it linked up to this site, but it might take a while.  In the meantime, I’ll try to post news here and hope that curious thrillseekers will be able to find it!

Any advice for getting a new web address to show up at the top of searches on Google, Yahoo, etc.?  I’ve already added this URL to their sites, but I don’t know if there are any secrets for helping it along.

In the meantime, here’s a weird picture of a kid enjoying a hot dog:

New Blog, New Novel

I’m happy to announce that my new novel, The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo, is now available from St. Martin’s Griffin!  I’m also happy to announce this new blog, which will hopefully be a way to keep my web self all current and everything.

“Darrin Doyle’s The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo is about, well, the girl who ate Kalamazoo, but it’s about much more than that: family, religion, urban blight and renewal, fame, literature, sister love, and weightlifters. In creating this girl who can and will eat everything, Darrin Doyle has created a way to talk about the things that matter most to us. It’s an incredible, riotous, beautifully written, sneakily profound novel. I don’t know of another book like it; I would be jealous of it if I weren’t so busy being amazed.”—Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

“As quirky, funny, and masterful as it is, Darrin Doyle’s The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo isn’t just a book about a girl who ate a city – it’s about the hunger we all have, for love, for family, for home.”  Alix Ohlin, author of The Missing Person

In this charming novel, Darrin Doyle paints a captivating portrait of the all-American family—if the all-American family’s youngest child ate an entire city in Michigan with a smile, that is.  Doyle has a flare for writing about family dysfunction with a twist. With a unique blend of realism and fantasy, The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo is the moving story of the hauntingly beautiful Audrey Mapes, who began her illustrious “career” by downing crayons by the carton only to graduate to eating an entire city one bite at a time. With vivid, acerbic wit, Doyle details the life of the world’s most gifted “eatist” through the eyes of Audrey’s sister, McKenna. Through her eyes, we see the real tragedy of the Mapes story is not the destruction of a city, but rather, the quiet disintegration of a family who just didn’t quite know how to love.