Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives Paperback by Brad Watson

Product Details

• Publisher: WW Norton (2011-03-15)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 272 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780393338850
• Item Weight: 222.26 grams
• Dimensions: 20.96 x 13.97 x 1.91 cm

Finalist for the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: "Watson's talent is singular, truly awesome; [his stories] are infused with an uncanny beauty."—A. M. Homes

In this, his first collection of stories since his celebrated, award-winning Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson takes us even deeper into the riotous, appalling, and mournful oddity of human beings.

In prose so perfectly pitched as to suggest some celestial harmony, he writes about every kind of domestic discord: unruly or distant children, alienated spouses, domestic abuse, loneliness, death, divorce. In his masterful title novella, a freshly married teenaged couple are visited by an unusual pair of inmates from a nearby insane asylum—and find out exactly how mismatched they really are.

With exquisite tenderness, Watson relates the brutality of both nature and human nature. There’s no question about it. Brad Watson writes so well—with such an all-seeing, six-dimensional view of human hopes, inadequacies, and rare grace—that he must be an extraterrestrial.

About the Author

Brad Watson was the National Book Award shortlisted author of Last Days of the Dog Men, The Heaven of Mercury, and Miss Jane. Originally from Mississippi, at the time of his death he was a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Wyoming.