New York, NY: W.W. Norton (2002)

This First Edition Club pick for August of 2002 was a finalist for the National Book Award. Brad Watson is from Meridian, Mississippi, and now teaches creative writing at The University of Wyoming, Laramie.

Finus Bates has Loved chatty, elegant Birdie Wells ever since he saw her cartwheel naked through the woods near the backwater town of Mercury, Mississippi, in 1917. He’s loved her for some eighty years: through their marriages to other people, through the mysterious early death of Birdie’s womanizing husband, Earl, and through all the poisonous accusations against Birdie by Earl’s no-good relatives. With “graceful, patient, insightful and hilarious” prose (USA Today), Brad Watson chronicles Finus’s steadfast devotion and Mercury’s evolution from a sleepy backwater to a small city. With this “tragicomic story of missed opportunities and unjust necessities” (Fred Chappell), “Southern storytelling is alive and well in Watson’s capable hands” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). “His work may remind readers of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, or Flannery O’Connor, but has a power–and a charm–all its own, more pellucid than the first, gentler than the second, and kinder than the third” (Baltimore Sun).

New York, NY: Norton (1996)

Watson, in precise and beautiful prose, 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 or reflections of themselves. In each of these stories he captures the animal crannies of the human personality–yearning for freedom and mourning the loss of something wild.