Last Days of the Dog-Men

MORE PRAISE FOR LAST DAYS OF THE DOG-MEN

“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

“A book for those of us who like our dogs doggy — that is, unsentimentalized, unanthropomorphized, decent-in-their-hearts vomit-eaters — and our people the same way. The prose is crisp as a morning in deer season, rife with spirited good humor and high intelligence.”

— Pinckney Benedict

“[T]he 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 Hempel, Elle

“Stunning. superb. Should become essential to the canon.”

— Commercial Appeal [Memphis, Tennessee]

“Brad Watson’s prose is exciting, superb. 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

“[B]racing prose, heralding the arrival of a new talent on the literary scene.”

— Tuscaloosa [Alabama] News

“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 Olmstead

“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 [Mississippi] Ledger

“Last Days of the Dog-Men observes without blinking the inevitable, necessary, and bewildering relationships between people and dogs, between men and women. Brad Watson writes brilliantly and knows what he is talking about.”

— Fred Chappell

“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

“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 to life’s bare minimums: food, shelter, and companionship. Last Days of the Dog-Men is a powerful debut by a master storyteller.”

— Jill McCorkle

“Consider me a serious fan of Watson’s brilliant storytelling. He’s as bull-hearted and true a writer as any of the Southern masters.”

— Bob Shacochis

“In the pages of his quietly crafted prose, Watson digs with a persistence only a canine tracing a scent can match, into piles of the familiar and intractable emotions of his characters, their relationships, and their dogs.”

— San Francisco Review

“[W]ry commentary on the base nature of humanity.”

— Macon [Georgia] Telegraph

“Stunning.”

— Spectator [Raleigh, N.C.]

“The insight and beauty with which [Watson] writes reveals a deep love for both dogs and people, and yet his unflinching gaze at their abiding foibles seems to have provoked in him an intense anger at their unpardonable sins.”

— Trenton [New Jersey] Times

“A powerful debut collection.”

— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Watson has uncanny insight.”

— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“HIS PEOPLE AND DOGS — THOSE WONDERFUL DOGS!

— COME ALIVE WITH HONEST, THRUMMING ENERGY.”

— New York Times Book Review