Skip to content

THE HEAVEN OF MERCURY

Brad Watson

A Novel

Brad Watson's first novel was eagerly awaited after his breathtaking, award-winning debut collection of short stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men. In The Heaven of Mercury, Watson fulfills that literary promise with a humorous and jaundiced eye.
Finus Bates has loved Birdie Wells since the day he saw her do a naked cartwheel in the woods in 1916. Later he won her at poker, lost her, then nearly won her again after the mysterious poisoning of her womanizing husband. Does Vish, the old medicine woman down in the ravine, hold the key to Birdie's elusive character? Or does Parnell, the town undertaker, whose unspeakable desires bring lust for life and death together? Or does the secret lie with some other colorful old-timer in Mercury, Mississippi, not such a small town anymore? With "graceful, patient, insightful and hilarious" prose (USA Today), Brad Watson chronicles Finus's steadfast devotion and Mercury's evolution from a sleepy backwater to a small city.

Brad Watson (19552020) was the author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Heaven of Mercury and Miss Jane, and two collections of stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. His work has been recognized by the short list and long list of the National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Great Lakes New Writers Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction (twice), the Southern Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, a National Endowment of the Arts Grant in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harper Lee Award, and the Award in Letters granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He taught creative writing at Harvard University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Wyoming, Laramie.
Available products
Book

Published 2025-08-02 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

Brad Watson has set his superb second novel in a small Mississippi city near the Gulf of Mexico. The heat, damp, whisky, bigotry and family skulduggery suggest juicy Southern Gothic. Although The Heaven of Mercury is born of that tradition, it transcends its parentage.

Vividly peopled, full of surprises, The Heaven of Mercury is a deeply satisfying novel.

Watson traces a dark but resonant journey through the world of the Southern gothic in his bleak, touching debut novel.

A seamless interweaving of narrative, remembrance, dreaming, and fantasy unifies a wealth of colorful tragicomic materialin a superb first novel by the Alabama storywriter.

A fast-paced, myth-echoing, tragic-comic commentary on our modern lives.

Set in the fictional town of Mercury, Mississippi, The Heaven of Mercury offers us necrophilia, murder, a talking cat, strange goings-on with an excised human heart and a number of ghostly apparitions. Yet it encompasses far more than this; and what might have been mere gothic extravaganza becomes, in the hands of this gifted writer, a subtle and moving meditation on the themes of continuity and impermanence, love and loss.

Sort of a calm wail. Each page a deep pleasure.

[A] lushly written novel of Deep Southern dream and landscape.

An intensity reminiscent of Faulkner, a bleak humor that recalls Flannery O'Connor, a whimsy inspired by Eudora Welty and a spontaneity suggesting prime Barry Hanna. Reading The Heaven of Mercury certainly restores one's faith in Southern literature's ability to startle and surprise. the risks pay off with insightful observations, dynamic relationships and scenes that crackle with tension and possibility.

[A] superb novel, graced with lush and exciting prose in the Southern high rhetorical tradition.

[A]n unforgettable story.The accidents, the disappointments, the corrections, and the secrets each life contains are woven into a deeply sympathetic portrait of small town life at its worst and best.

Gimcrack storytelling...grounded by generous humanity.

Rye Field Publishing Co. (Chinese Complex); Muza (Polish); Emece (Spanish); Le Livre De Poche (French); Canongate (UK)

Extraordinary.. Mixes whimsy and hard truth in a way that's heartbreaking.. Pungently erotic, and as affectionate as it is acidic. a perfect modern southern gothic.