Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories - Softcover

Watson, Brad

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393321207 ISBN 13: 9780393321203

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002

Synopsis

"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 Academy of Arts and Letters and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. In each of these "weird and wonderful stories" (Boston Globe), 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. "Elegant and elegiac, beautifully pitched to the human ear, yet resoundingly felt in our animal hearts" (New York Newsday), Watson's vibrant prose 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. Pinckney Benedict praises Watson's writing as "crisp as a morning in deer season, rife with spirited good humor and high intelligence," and Fred Chappell calls his stories "strong and true to the place they come from." This powerful debut collection marks Brad Watson's introduction into "a distinguished [Southern] literary heritage, from Faulkner to Larry Brown to Barry Hannah to Richard Ford" (The State, Columbia, South Carolina).

About this title

Review:

Frequently portrayed as beer-guzzling, duck-shooting, wife-beating bigots, Southern white men don't catch much of a break these days. Yet in Last Days of Dog-Men, Brad Watson manages to portray this much-maligned beast with empathy and insight. Equally important, he also manages to make clear the importance of their dogs--an importance that can cut both ways. In the title story, for example, a man has an affair that's consummated in the foam-rubber pole-vault pad at the local playing field. When his wife finds out, she gets even the surest way she knows how, by having his dog put to sleep.

From the Publisher:

In Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson brings us an anthology unlike any other: stories about dogs and people and their undeniable, unbreakable link to one another. Here Watson unerringly captures the canine component 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--while portraying dogs as the loyal servants to their masters' complex emotional needs.

In precise and beautiful prose Brad Watson tells stories that are funny, dark, and vividly expressive. Last Days of the Dog-Men is a stellar collection heralding the arrival of a true talent.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0393321207
• ISBN 13: 9780393321203
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144