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Sun Dogs
Wilson Hand, haunted by memories of his ex-wife's suicide and his captivity with the Viet Cong, leaves his urban industrial investigation business to become a troubleshooter for an Alaskan oil company
- GenresFiction
218 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
52 people want to read
About the author
Robert Olen Butler
86 books456 followers“I’ll never stop believing it: Robert Olen Butler is the best living American writer, period.”
– Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway.
In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, several other major annual anthologies, and numerous college literature textbooks from such publishers as Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking, Little Brown & Co., Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.Martin and most recently in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford.
His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, Greek, and most recently Chinese. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Over the past two decades he has lectured in universities, appeared at conferences, and met with writers groups in 17 countries as a literary envoy for the U. S. State Department.
He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Under the auspices of the FSU website, in the fall of 2001, he did something no other writer has ever done, before or since: he revealed his writing process in full, in real time, in a webcast that observed him in seventeen two-hour sessions write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. He also gave a running commentary on his artistic choices and spent a half-hour in each episode answering the emailed questions of his live viewers. The whole series, under the title “Inside Creative Writing” is a very popular on YouTube, with its first two-hour episode passing 125,000 in the spring of 2016.
For more than a decade he was hired to write feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. Typical of Hollywood, none of these movies ever made it to the screen.
Reflecting his early training as an actor, he has also recorded the audio books for four of his works—A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Hell, A Small Hotel and Perfume River. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree from the State University of New York system. He lives in Florida, with his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler.
– Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway.
In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, several other major annual anthologies, and numerous college literature textbooks from such publishers as Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking, Little Brown & Co., Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.Martin and most recently in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford.
His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, Greek, and most recently Chinese. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Over the past two decades he has lectured in universities, appeared at conferences, and met with writers groups in 17 countries as a literary envoy for the U. S. State Department.
He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Under the auspices of the FSU website, in the fall of 2001, he did something no other writer has ever done, before or since: he revealed his writing process in full, in real time, in a webcast that observed him in seventeen two-hour sessions write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. He also gave a running commentary on his artistic choices and spent a half-hour in each episode answering the emailed questions of his live viewers. The whole series, under the title “Inside Creative Writing” is a very popular on YouTube, with its first two-hour episode passing 125,000 in the spring of 2016.
For more than a decade he was hired to write feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. Typical of Hollywood, none of these movies ever made it to the screen.
Reflecting his early training as an actor, he has also recorded the audio books for four of his works—A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Hell, A Small Hotel and Perfume River. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree from the State University of New York system. He lives in Florida, with his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 10, 2012
Wilson Hand hates clutter with an increasing ferocity.
His ex-wife,Beth,embraces clutter as it fills the gaps in her existence.
Wison flees the crowded city,taking a job in Alaska where he hopes to find some kind of peace. Beth leaves altogether.
The novel begins with endings. Wilson has packed up his office,checked into a hotel, goes to see Beth for one last unsatisfactory goodbye.The incident in the subway while he is on his way there is indicitive that perhaps Wison Hand is not as in control of his life as he appears.He is a man on the run from himself, trying too hard not to be a cliche.
Even Alaska does not seem to provide him with enough emptiness. His flahbacks intensify,and then he meets the enigmatic Marta,and meets her conditions for an affair that appeases him enough to completely distract him from his job,which he has no interest in anyways. That is, until he begins to figure out what is really going on, and finds out more than he ever wanted to know.
Wilson Hand is not a likable man,unless he is trying to seduce you. His behavior is abrubt, arrogant, intended to disorient, a kind of controlled impulsiveness that his new acquaintances call hard-nosed,and they leave him alone. His style of detection is passive aggressive, and he switches between the two with considered ease. He is a subtle bully with a warped sense of loyalty and a sensitive shadow. It is ROBs genius to have me caring for this awful dude and discovering some moral depth and complexity. The earth speaks its secrets to him. He cares about his chosen people in his own way.
In the hands of a less skilled writer of lesser imaginings, this could have been a standard thriller instead of the hauntingly disturbing meditation on the meaning of life that I think that it is. The shock of the ending,in a final stroke of genius, leaves us oddly comforted and certainly considering which of ROB's books to read next.
His ex-wife,Beth,embraces clutter as it fills the gaps in her existence.
Wison flees the crowded city,taking a job in Alaska where he hopes to find some kind of peace. Beth leaves altogether.
The novel begins with endings. Wilson has packed up his office,checked into a hotel, goes to see Beth for one last unsatisfactory goodbye.The incident in the subway while he is on his way there is indicitive that perhaps Wison Hand is not as in control of his life as he appears.He is a man on the run from himself, trying too hard not to be a cliche.
Even Alaska does not seem to provide him with enough emptiness. His flahbacks intensify,and then he meets the enigmatic Marta,and meets her conditions for an affair that appeases him enough to completely distract him from his job,which he has no interest in anyways. That is, until he begins to figure out what is really going on, and finds out more than he ever wanted to know.
Wilson Hand is not a likable man,unless he is trying to seduce you. His behavior is abrubt, arrogant, intended to disorient, a kind of controlled impulsiveness that his new acquaintances call hard-nosed,and they leave him alone. His style of detection is passive aggressive, and he switches between the two with considered ease. He is a subtle bully with a warped sense of loyalty and a sensitive shadow. It is ROBs genius to have me caring for this awful dude and discovering some moral depth and complexity. The earth speaks its secrets to him. He cares about his chosen people in his own way.
In the hands of a less skilled writer of lesser imaginings, this could have been a standard thriller instead of the hauntingly disturbing meditation on the meaning of life that I think that it is. The shock of the ending,in a final stroke of genius, leaves us oddly comforted and certainly considering which of ROB's books to read next.
May 19, 2019
This is a work of heavy literary fiction about being haunted by death and loneliness but also an action packed thriller that makes it a page turner. It is more successful at the former than the latter (plotline becomes more obvious as it goes, though certainly this could easily have been adapted to a screenplay) but the writing pulls it through - contemplative and deeply moving. It fairs well enough for its age - interesting to compare the climate change viewpoint of the 80’s to today as well as the accessorial use of females in general in the book (a truly male novel). It sat on my shelves for 25 years before I finally got around to reading it, but it was worth the wait - I probably got more out of it now that my life is more seasoned than I would have when I was younger anyway.
February 1, 2013
I read this because I was in the wilderness and had just finished my only book. This was all there was to do when it was 40C and you were waiting for it to cool off before continuing a desert hike where you had to carry all your water. I knew nothing about the book or author before picking it up. What started off interesting quickly became self pitying then started dragging and ended up like the author just wanted to finish the book but didn't know how and had just lost all sense of the story. Probably had a deadline. Anyway, it past the time and didn't make me angry or want to stab my eyes.
January 8, 2011
Quit 80% of the way through. Boring, going nowhere, characters had no motivation, cliche Vietnam flashbacks, and some poorly constructed sentences with classic ambiguous-antecedent problems. This guy needs an editor. I bought it because "Hell" has been on my to-read list, but not anymore.
October 16, 2015
It was well written but the story left me cold and distanced from it. Extremely male narrative.
February 29, 2024
3.5 good novel great ending
July 13, 2023
Too much talk of groins, I read the whole book but feel like I read less than half
December 3, 2011
I found this to be a very strange book. I didn't enjoy reading it one bit -- didn't like the characters (ANY of them), the setting (North Slope Alaska), the subject (death), the technique (bizarre psychological stuff). I finished it only because it was so short - more like a novella.
The strange thing is that I can recall much of this book - which is a rarity. I mean, I can put a book down and have trouble telling you very much about it. But this one ... for some reason it just stuck.? That's a real mystery to me.
The strange thing is that I can recall much of this book - which is a rarity. I mean, I can put a book down and have trouble telling you very much about it. But this one ... for some reason it just stuck.? That's a real mystery to me.
February 6, 2013
Heavy going but I love his writing. It might have not been the best book to read in the dead of winter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews