The World’s Most Frequently Bombed Hotel is a story with a big heart filled with vivid, singular, sometimes raw, characters who come to life in Stowell’s tales of Belfast, Northern Ireland where he lived in a Catholic neighborhood which had the highest rate of violent incidents anywhere in the country during the “war”(AKA “The Troubles”). That is the way he operates wherever he goes. He lives within the culture and gets to know the people on their ground, on their terms. All in service of the story’s ultimate question: In places like Belfast where does hope come from?

The press has called Stowell, “A great American storyteller. “ “A genius” “Not to be missed.” His work has been compared to or with, Lewis Carrol, William Faulkner, Gary Snyder, Mark Twain, Fellini and the Marx Brothers.