Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives
Stories
31 March 2010
Description
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 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.
Reviews
"Watson's talent is singular, truly awesome; [his stories] are infused with an uncanny beauty." — A.M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven
"Watson’s skill as an author is to create characters who walk that razor-thin line between eliciting our compassion or our dismissal." — Tom Bennitt, Fiction Writers Review
"[The stories] deal with all manner of family strife which Brad Watson makes palpable and heartfelt with prose so accurate and invisible, when you read his writing it’s as if you are imagining and creating the story. Needless to say, the peripatetic Watson is a great pleasure to read." — Robert Birnbaum, The Morning News
"Watson layers his pathos with heavy doses of humor, tempering his sorrowful truth telling with merciful moments of comic relief." — Ed Tarkington, Chapter 16
"Mr. Watson’s rare talent shines and dazzles whenever he dives deep into the lives of ordinary people and comes up, almost effortless, with buried treasures that have blessed and cursed humanity: broken dreams, unfulfilled desires, [and] murderous intent." — Yunte Huang, Santa Barbara News Press
"Precise, surprising . . . gorgeously turned sentences." — Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness
"Watson is a master at hairpin plot turns, and his characters come alive on the page with minimal backstory; readers get deep into their heads and hearts, even when the weirdness surrounding them feels like something out of a David Lynch movie." — Publishers Weekly
"Consistently delivers that elusive element great Southern writers have always brought to the table—a delicious sense of the unexpected." — Kirkus Reviews
"Essential reading and highly recommended." — Library Journal
"Powerful stories." — Booklist
Standalone Ebook
9780393078152
COMING SOON