Last Days Of The Dog Men Stories Paperback by Brad Watson

Product Details

• Publisher: WW Norton (2002-08-27)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 146 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780393321203
• Item Weight: 113.4 grams
• Dimensions: 20.29 x 13.72 x 0.86 cm

"His people and dogs—those wonderful dogs!—come alive with honest, thrumming energy." —The New York Times Book Review

Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award

 

In prose so precise and beautiful it makes a reader's hair stand on end, Brad Watson writes about people and dogs: dogs as companions, as accomplices, and as unwitting victims of human passions; and people responding to dogs as missing parts of themselves. In each of these stories he captures the animal crannies of the human personality -- yearning for freedom, mourning the loss of something wild, drawn to human connection but also to thoughtless abandon and savagery without judgment. Ultimately, however, people are responsible where dogs are not: "I'm told in medieval times," the narrator of the title story tells us, "animals were regularly put on trial, with witnesses and testimony and so forth. But it is relatively rare today." 

 

Funny, dark, sometimes brutal, and stunning in their perfection of expression, Watson's stories herald the arrival of a true talent.

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.