Ferrell Swan has fled the shambles of his life in Ohio for the vast and empty landscape of Idaho’s high desert. Here he tries to escape his past and its failures—even to escape memory itself. He seeks solace in sunrises and sunsets, wild mustangs and wheeling hawks, and the coyotes that roam his one hundred acres of scrubland. Through visits from his stepson and his ex-wife, through occasional contacts with odd and reclusive neighbors, Swan confronts himself in order to realize his humanity.

Mitch Wieland is the author of a novel, Willy Slater’s Lane (SMU, 1996); his short fiction has been published in such venues as Southern Review, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Yale Review, Shenandoah, and Sewanee Review. He teaches in the M.F.A. program at Boise State University, where he is founding editor of the Idaho Review. He is the recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship and two literature fellowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. He is presently working on a novel set in Tokyo, Japan, where he taught English for four years before earning his M.F.A. from the University of Alabama.

“God’s Dogs pulls off impressively what seems, in practice, almost impossible to do well—a novel in stories. Fastidious, trenchant, spare and often eloquent, Mitch Wieland’s stories have great breadth, powerful sympathies, and a renewing comprehension of our human selves which we only find in the best literature.” --Richard Ford

“With a keen divination of the deepest emotions, Mitch Wieland has found a mythological dimension in this accidental community of self-isolating loners in the vast (but hardly empty) spaces of Idaho.” --Madison Smartt Bell

“Wieland’s is a book bigger than its well-fit parts, a book that rouses and reaches for more than the expected, a book that gets our crooked kind right, a book that shakes the dickens out of the heart, a book that offers Big Answers to Big Questions. And reminds you what a miracle it is that perdurable art—the art that matters to the species—is made out of words and words alone.” --Lee K. Abbott

“One of our country’s best magazine editors shows where he gets his know-how—he’s a keen creator of fine stories and makes characters out of sentences all of us should envy and ties his characters to this land of ours with a knot you couldn’t cut with a sword—a lone coyote calls from the ravine . . . ‘I’m here,’ it asks; ‘Anyone else?’ I am. You’ll want to be.” --Alan Cheuse

“Mitch Wieland writes with fearless wonder, a piercing sense of loss, and the resilient grace of humor. Rilla and Ferrell and all their miraculous companions will break your heart a hundred times, and a hundred times restore you. Reading God’s Dogs is pure joy, a reminder all life is love, and love alone sustains us.” --Melanie Rae Thon

“Edgy, long-suffering, self-flagellating, tender as the arch of a newborn's foot, tough as salted jerky—Ferrell Swan saws his way through his so-called retirement with the determination of a man who insists on being true to his nature, despite the opposition of nearly everyone and everything else in his life. No one knows the truth of that saying, ‘The heart never fits its longing,’ more intimately than Mitch Wieland.” --Brad Watson

“Mitch Wieland's stories are like his characters: wind-swept, isolated, trembling with longing. God's Dogs is about the pinioning of the invisible against the visible, about the way something unrestrained and deeply meaningful smolders beneath the surface of what at first looks very composed. This is a powerful, lonesome, beautifully-written collection.” --Anthony Doerr

“I am reminded of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. This novel is beautifully paced and brilliantly written. You can taste the grit of the earth and feel the rising heat of the day and the chill of the night. A novel well worth rereading. I salute its maker.” --George Core