Letting Loose the Hounds

By Brady Udall

Book Overview

Exploding with an unsettling exuberance, Brady Udall's stories traverse a geography of lost love, fragmented lives, and satisfying revenge. From the night a six-foot-three Apache Indian holding a goat steps into a moonlit Arizona backyard in "Midnight Raid" to the pivotal moment when a man, delirious from a dental extraction, gets rescued by a stranger in the title story, Udall injects his stories and characters with equal parts darkness and humor. These are sad and sweet stories, moving from the familiar to surprising destinations. But even when disaster looms, Udall's fine comic sense sustains his men and women in their sometimes extravagant efforts to connect and cope. Plunged in the moment, these stories have velocity; they spray gravel as they take off.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393335542
• ISBN13: 9780393335545
• Release Date: April 2010
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 3.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

how short stories are worth as many novels

Usually I don't like very much short stories. But this book has something new in it: each story is what is called in French a "slice of life" :) B Udall sends us in the very core of an ordinary life, in which appear both the uniqueness of our own small lifes and an immense tenderness for the human struggle for finding a meaning to them. Stories are of Southern ordinary Americans, with their own small dramas, loves, fears and hopes. Progressively the reader ends deeply "attached" to the life of each of the character, and understands what keeps them together in a single book, which appears in the end as a great novel. Udall is young and could become one of the outsanding writers of these times. So much talent so young, and a creation made up with ordinary things the kind of which everyone sees everyday. You'll be jealous...

Letting Loose the Hounds

The only problem with Brady Udall's stories is that he hasn't written more of them. Hurry up, Udall, will ya?

Couldn't put it down!

This book is a collection of touching, amusing and extremely insightful life experiences. The author has a soulful, optomistic outlook tempered by stark reality. Hope there will be many more to follow!

Gritty, true wit

One of the best story collections I've read. All the pieces fit--though some of them have been scattered quite far, Udall has confidently traipsed out to the edges and brought them back.

read this book

The best book of short stories I have ever read. If you like Thom Jones, Denis Johnson or T.C. Boyle, then give this book a shot.