Famous Dogs of the Civil War (The Divers Collection)

It’s in August of 1969 that Michael Dugan, still in his late 20s and bedecked with laurels and degrees, has an encounter that changes his life. Though he’s come home jauntily thinking he knows a lot, he doesn’t yet know what he doesn’t know about war, race, love, and himself—which are things he’s going to learn in the course of what several who knew him back then would probably have called “the belated education of a white southern liberal male.” Two women assist and preside over that painfully ludicrous process, one of whom summons it up nearly a half-century later. . . after Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize (he’s the source of the novel’s title along with a good deal else).”

Ben Dunlap, introduced for his 2007 TED Talk as “a master storyteller,” has been a writer, teacher, dancer, and television producer, as well as a Rhodes Scholar. This is his first novel, Number 4 in The Divers Collection. The cover art is based on a painting by Jack Freeman.