Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories [Paperback]

Brad Watson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 2002

"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).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Dogs, in their simplicity and certainty, have an emotional stature equal to that of the people whose souls they seem to mirror in these eight precisely crafted stories. "Humans," says the narrator of the title story, "are aware of very little, it seems to me, the artificial brainy side of life... the doltish psychologies we've placed over our lives like a stencil. A dog keeps his life simple and unadorned. He is who he is, and his only task is to assert this." This narrator takes up jogging with a greyhound that helps him get back into shape, until his wife has the dog put to sleep, to get back at him for cheating on her. In "The Wake," a highly symbolic, surreal tale, a stray dog's death beneath a man's house coincides with his receipt in the mail of a packing crate that contains his ex-lover, whose accusatory voice confronts him with past mistakes and failures and his tendency, as it were, to let dead dogs lie. "Bill" concerns an octogenarian woman whose main companion, a trembling, almost blind poodle, means more to her than her husband, who's confined to a rest home. Dogs in these enigmatic stories are inextricably linked with human destinies, marking the trajectories of lives, marriages, jobs, secret affairs, divorces. Alabama-based Watson has uncanny insight into canine psychology and, beyond that, into how people project their own emotions, aggression, love and insecurities onto pets and the animal kingdom.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 146 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (August 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393321207
• ISBN-13: 978-0393321203
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #980,010 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Jewel of a Book, August 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Last Days of the Dog-Men (Paperback)

This is a very fine book, containing writing of such finely chiselled precision that I'd often find myself stunned into introspection by the power of Watson's insight or a particularly poignant turn of phrase. This doesn't happen often; it's the power of deep music or a great painting to stop you right there! to think it out.

Watson's use of the dog to illuminate the spirit of humanity and its tangle of desire is sublimely realized. He deftly avoids reducing the dog or its humans to Obvious Metaphor, a move that would have been all too easy if he'd conceived this relationship as Hallmark-type schmaltz. The people and dogs in these pages transcend mere caricature; they become more than the sum of the words used to describe them and achieve something like living. It's an uncanny evocation of the complex world of pain, desire and loss that lurks just beneath the patina of everyday memory and dull rationalization. Like some animal supersense, Watson's writing cuts through the veneer of the commonplace to examine the crux of our most important matters. Watson gives us ourselves, unprettified and naked, shivering with emotion and memory and the ugly afterbirth of the various tragedies that compose the fabric of our lives.

These are stories to be cherished and enjoyed.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this book, April 12, 2010

By 

Ann-oh - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories (Paperback)

I am not enthusiastic about short stories, but this collection was a page turner.

It's got some southern gothic in it, sure, but I didn't find it depressing. Rich

and very pleasurable.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A classic-to-be in the horror genre, July 1, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories (Hardcover)

This is another book review by Wolfie and Kansas, the boonie dogs from Toto, Guam. Human reviewers seem to have trouble placing the stories in Brad Watson's "Last Days of the Dog-Men" in the proper genre, describing these little gems as literary fiction. To dogs, however, these stories belong in the horror genre. In practically every story, a dog is murdered. From a canine viewpoint, these stories are what we would expect from Edgar Allen Poe if he had decided to use dogs as victims in his stories.

Watson's treatment of his canine characters is surprisingly good for a human author. Our only complaint is that he nonetheless spends more time developing his human characters. While he handles them well, they are intrinsically less interesting than dogs. Perhaps in his next collection, Watson will dispense with the noncanine animals of primate derivation and focus exclusively on dogs