The Dahlia Field - Softcover

Selected as one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Indie Books of 2017

"With sensitivity and deadpan humor, Alley's luminous stories explore a wealth of characters and social types thrown into fertile combinations. His prose is limpid and straightforward, laced with droll psychology--"Garret found himself in the midst of a very familiar position where everything that was happening was his business, but even so he had nothing to say"--and sometimes opening into an evocative, elegiac poetry: "Times when in high school, looking out on a late afternoon, I would enter that bricklit life of deserted curbs in the city, newspapers blowing under cinderblocks at newsstands with no one seeing, and would wonder what it was like to be lonely." The results are funny, poignant, and engrossing. . . . A fine collection that explores and celebrates the ebb and flow of gay life."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In this exceptional collection of stories, Henry Alley delineates an endearing picture of the Pacific Northwest as well as some points beyond. In his precise yet vivid prose he gets to the heart of both a physical setting and the emotions of its inhabitants. These inhabitants, more often than not, are gay men of a certain age who are still at the height of their sexuality and draw.

--John Francis Leonard, A & U Magazine