Dog Run Moon | Granta

  • Published: 11/02/2016
  • ISBN: 9781847088161
  • Granta Books
  • 256 pages

Dog Run Moon

Callan Wink

A construction worker is chased through the night by a shady local businessman whose dog he has stolen; a Wild West re-enactor is engaged in a long-running affair with the Indian ‘squaw’ who slays him on the battlefield every year; a boy is tasked by his father to rid the farm of cats. Playing out against the rugged backdrop of the untamed West, these stories are populated by characters who are toughened by life but still tender enough to bleed, to cry, to care, and to dream.

With its taut plotting and calloused sensibility, Dog Run Moon is written deep in the American grain, and yet Callan Wink’s humour, empathy and layered storytelling creates a fictional world entirely his own. This remarkable debut reminds you just how effortlessly powerful good writing can be.

Wink's debut is impressive indeed. Fine, old-fashioned, rich and juicy fiction. Weeks later, I'm still living with the characters

Jim Harrison, author, Legends of the Fall

The perils of work and the weight of bequeathal fuel these stories and each one holds a lasting, unshakeable image. Sometimes grace is bestowed upon the characters in a sidewindering not altogether fabulous fashion and sometimes it's not bestowed at all. Wink seems to know well the stratagems and delusions of mens' hearts. He also seems born and bred for short story mastery

Joy Williams

Callan Wink's stories remind me of expertly tied trout flies-beautifully crafted, true to reality, and barbed. What a fine young writer

Ron Rash, author, Above the Waterfall

The Author

CALLAN WINK has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays appear widely, including in the New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, Playboy, Men’s Journal, and The Best American Short Stories anthology. His first book, Dog Run Moon, was short-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize and received a PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention. He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

August

Callan Wink

August is an average twelve year old – he likes dogs and fishing, and doesn’t even mind early morning chores on his family’s farm. When his parents’ marriage falls apart and he has to start over in a new town, he tries hard to be an average teen – playing football and doing his homework – but he struggles to form friendships, and when a shocking act of violence pushes him off course once more, he flees to rural Montana. There, as he throws himself into work on a ranch, he comes to learn that even the smallest of communities have secrets and even the most broken of families have a bond.

Beautifully written and unfolding against an epic American landscape, August is a compelling, authentic and poignant story of the joys and traumas that irrevocably shape us all.

Callan Wink on Granta.com

Fiction | Granta Books

August

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‘This was going to be harder than he had thought.’

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Why Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is the best book of 1970.

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Exotics

Callan Wink

‘He’d come to tell her that he was leaving. It seemed rather impossible now – the telling, not the leaving.’