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.
- ISBN10 0393321207
- ISBN13 9780393321203
- Publish Date 8 August 2003 (first published 20 August 1996)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 20 May 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint WW Norton & Co
- Format Paperback
- Pages 144
- Language English