Douglas W. Milliken

Praise for ONE THOUSAND OWLS BEHIND YOUR CHEST

“One of Portland’s most prolific and original fiction writers.”
—The Portland Dispatch

“In Milliken’s stories, you get characters who seem like regular-ass people until their motivations […] collide them.”
—The Portland Phoenix

Praise for CREAM RIVER

“I believe Doug Milliken has a firm grasp of life’s little traumas. He takes his chunk of loving meat and hangs it from a butcher’s hook on display for the world to read.”
—from the foreword by Ben Trickey, singer/songwriter

“Cream River […] is still on my mind, as if its characters were hanging around in the dark shadows of my consciousness. […] I was blown away by “Color Wheel.” I also loved how the stories had a series of sometimes evident and sometimes subterranean connections that became especially intriguing as the cycle approached its end. I highly recommend reading Cream River.”
—Jonathan Weisberg, The Stoneslide Corrective

“I loved every story, every word.”
—Erin Sprinkle, singer/songwriter

Praise for TO SLEEP AS ANIMALS

“[…] it is impossible not to be the weird kid in Milliken’s Reno. To Sleep as Animals is a mystery about characters succumbing to their spaces, how such a rugged landscape sustains so many strange and dangerous lives.”
—The Collagist

“A disturbance of a very specific flavor […] Milliken’s writing is urgent yet finely considered—a literate pleasure.”
—Carl Skoggard, translator of Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood circa 1900.

“A distinctive and often vertiginously frightening psychological landscape […] bracingly disturbing.”
—Megan Grumbling, author of Persephone in the Late Anthropocene.

Praise for BRAND NEW MOON

“These stories […] glow with some sort of holy light, as if every moment were magic, like footage of your family picnic on super 8.”
—The Portland Phoenix

“Seriously the funniest thing I have ever read. I was laughing so much that [my wife] yelled at me. Probably because she was sleeping. And it was 2 AM.”
—Derek Kimball, Last House Productions

Praise for WHITE HORSES

“Douglas W. Milliken takes his time unveiling the savoring of the moment in a narrative of extremely gracious intimacy. The dignified personal. Expert surreal grounded prose. Pragmatic poetics that serve the whole. This man is a master of simile. And it never gets old because the associations are always complex and unexpected. Worked accuracy but seamlessly so. Wow throughout the heartbreaking sensuality. Its core a felled forest of need. The title story, ‘White Horses,’ cannot be improved, which is another way of saying it is perfect.”
—Melody Sumner Carnahan, co-founder of Burning Books.