Last Days of the Dog-Men
Stories
8 August 2003
Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.
Description
"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.
Reviews
"His people and dogs - those wonderful dogs! - come alive with honest, thrumming energy." — New York Times Book Review
"A sad, beautiful meditation on love, loss, and dogs...Watson's best writing is full of an unusual sort of lugubrious humor and depth." — Los Angeles Times
"Elegant and elegiac, beautifully pitched to the human ear, yet resoundingly felt in our animal hearts." — New York Newsday
"The dogs are not pets so much as fully realized characters, the equals – sometimes the betters – of the men and women stirring up today’s Deep South. Watson writes with surprising emotional force." — Amy Hempl, Elle
"Brad Watson's prose is exciting, suburb. Not a dull story here. Dogs? Well, often they're more interesting than their masters, certainly more abiding. Watson's people are the wretched dreams of honorable dogs. I read these pieces with great pleasure." — Barry Hannah, author of Airships
"Crisp as a morning in deer season, rife with spirited good humor and high intelligence." — Pinckney Benedict, author of Dogs of God
"Strong and true to the place they come from." — Fred Chappell, author of Dagon
"Brad Watson is a writer still mystified by his own immense talent. How could he not be? He writes sentences you wait a lifetime for. Tells stories you’ve never heard. Last Days of the Dog-Men is the best I’ve read in ages. Mercy for none, but salvation for all." — Robert Olmestead, author of The Coldest Night
"The very nature of Last Days of the Dog-Men - a gathering of 'dog' tales that exploits both the loyal and the feral nature of man's best friend - reflects Brad Watson's comically dark and deceptively wry vision in a prose as accurate as it is lovely." — Allen Wier, author of Blanco
"Brad Watson's stories are wholly original - humorous and heartbreaking: there is a compassion for both humans and dogs and the world as they know it that reduces the focus of life's bare minimums: food, shelter, and companionship. Last Days of the Dog-Men is a powerful debut by a master storyteller." — Jill McCorkle, author of Old Crimes
"Stunning...superb...Should become essential to the canon." — Commercial Appeal
"[This work ushers Watson into] a distinguished [Southern] literary heritage, from Faulkner to Larry Brown to Barry Hannah to Richard Ford." — The State
"Bracing prose, heralding the arrival of a new talent on the literary scene." — Tuscaloosa News
"Watson is a writer keenly aware of the duality of canine nature - the familiar, loving, always accepting domesticate, and the feral, wandering, howling wild animal...Extraordinary." — Clarion Ledger
Awards
Winner — Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, 1997
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