Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

In this, his first collection of stories since his celebrated, award-winning Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson relates the brutality of human experience with unique genius and tenderness, delving into the lives of ordinary characters stricken by loneliness, longing, frustration, and the lure of better worlds. In harmonious prose, Watson writes about every kind of domestic discord. In “Vacuum,” three young brothers make trouble when they call on the seedy neighborhood doctor to cheer up their underappreciated mother. Originally published in The New Yorker, “Visitation” follows a down-and-out, divorced father as he spends a weekend with his son at a California motel. A husband shoots himself in the foot in “The Terrible Argument,” letting down not only his wife but his dog as well. In the masterful title novella, a freshly married, disastrously mismatched, and expectant young couple are visited by an unusual pair of inmates from a nearby insane asylum, who just might be—or might as well be—aliens from another planet. Brad Watson writes with such an all-seeing, six-dimensional view of human hopes and inadequacies that his talent must come from another planet. With wry humor and otherworldly grace, he reminds us how alien we humans really are—to each other and to ourselves.