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Stories
by Brad Watson
In this, his first collection of stories since his celebrated, award-winning Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson takes us even deeper into the riotous, appalling, and mournful oddity of human beings.
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.
"Watson is a master at hairpin plot turns, and his characters come alive on the page with minimal backstory." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Watson's unforgettable characters are very real, despite their frightening predicaments, but seem to lack the wisdom and spiritual insight to change their lives...Essential reading and highly recommended." - Library Journal
"Watson consistently delivers that elusive element great Southern writers have always brought to the table - a delicious sense of the unexpected." - Kirkus Reviews
"National Book Award finalist Watson's powerful stories are a real downer, although he has moments of dark humor..." - Booklist
This information about Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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Photo: Neil Hanley
Brad Watson (1955–2020) was the author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Heaven of Mercury and Miss Jane, and two collections of stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. His work has been recognized by the short list and long list of the National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Great Lakes New Writers Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction (twice), the Southern Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, a National Endowment of the Arts Grant in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harper Lee Award, and the Award in Letters granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He taught ...
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