Brown Feathers by Steven Mulak

BROWN FEATHERS:

Waterfowling Tales and Upland Dreams

Brown Feathers was my first book, published by Stackpole in 1987. At the time, I was selling several short stories each year in various magazines, and Brown Feathers was a compilation of the best of them. The story “Branta Canadensis” was the cover story for the issue of Gray’s in which it initially appeared, as was “Wax and Wane” when it appeared in Sports Afield. “Wisdom” and “Meat Dog” were reprinted a couple times elsewhere, and “Housman’s Dog” was Sports Afield’s entry into a contest for “best fiction” in the year it appeared. I still think that “The Fella in the Red Hat” and “Of Ringers and Leaners” are among my best efforts, but I seem to be a minority of one in that regard. At the request of the publisher, I added a few stories to Brown Feathers that had not been previously published. (In retrospect, I can now see why I hadn’t been able to sell them.) As a separate part of the project, I had a lot of fun turning out pen & ink illustrations to match the various stories.

But like nearly all anthologies, nobody bought Brown Feathers, and it went “out of print” about five years after publication. Over the years I have either sold or given away all the copies I had of this book, and can no longer offer it for sale or barter. That being the case, and not wanting to tell you how good something is and then not being able to produce it, I have reprinted some of the stories from Brown Feathers in the section called “The Mulak Reader.” Enjoy.   

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This site was last updated 07/12/06