Dogwalker
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Tender and satiric, hilarious and humane, Dogwalker plunks readers down in a land of misfits and the circumstantially strange–where one young man buys drugs from a dealer who locks his customers in a closet, while another lands a cat-faced circus freak for a roommate, and yet another must choose between his pregnant wife and the ten-pound slug he’s convinced will bring him a fortune. And throughout these stories moves a divinely inspired collection of dogs: three-legged, no-legged, dogs that sing, that talk, and that give birth to humans. Brilliant, perplexing, and moving, this is a daring debut that strolls along society’s fringes and unearths strange beauty among its misfits
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bradford's bizarre, species-crossing debut collection of 12 stories hits the mark with its singular characters and odd scenarios, its eccentricities blissfully unforced. Peopled by a cast of hybrid dog-men, cat-faced circus freaks and sweetly bemused, more-or-less ordinary humans, these tales are compact gems, at once provocative and sweet. "Mattress" chronicles the nameless narrator's quest for the eponymous bedding, showcasing the carefree, harmless ethos of a genuine slacker; the plot of "Six Dog Christmas" can be deduced from the title, yet this delicious morsel (it clocks in at under five pages) is a serious charmer. Longer and less focused, though still held together by Bradford's loopy internal logic, is the meandering "Dogs," in which a man impregnates a dog, thus initiating an unsettling series of events involving potential messiahs and a woman in an iron lung giving birth to a litter of puppies. Though Bradford plays with weighty ideas (faith, the line separating man and beast), his less-is-more style may leave some readers wishing for a thicker, meatier text to chew on. However, even the most skeptical will be charmed by his guileless narrative voice. Every story is told from the first person, and though Bradford employs several narrators, the voice throughout remains consistent. Frank, good-hearted, slightly na ve, almost childlike in its simple chronicling of events, it will engage the reader immediately.
Customer Reviews
Pure black comic brilliance. Buy this book!
Forget J.D. Salinger or Haruki Murakami. Arthur Bradford is the best practitioner of the short story form to ever walk this earth. I'm not being flippant, I dig those other writers too, but I can put their books down easily enough. Pretty much every time I've picked up Dogwalker, I've read it cover to cover. I've leant my old dog-eared copy to at least 20 people over the years and everyone of them has loved it. Bradford's matter-of-fact cut-through-the-crap style is addictive. His use of magic realism is artful. I think I've re-read this collection 10 times, I really wish he'd write a new book soon, though from what I've read on Wikipedia and his blog, I gather he's busy being a new Dad.