‘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.
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Brad Watson (1955–2020) was the author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Heaven of Mercury and Miss Jane, and two collections of stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. His work has been recognized by the short list and long list of the National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Great Lakes New Writers Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction (twice), the Southern Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, a National Endowment of the Arts Grant in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harper Lee Award, and the Award in Letters granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He taught creative writing at Harvard University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Wyoming, Laramie.