"The Good Story may be every story you write, but the Good Story is also not your story."

Dog Days considers why we tell stories the way we do, and how we might tell them otherwise. Combining memoir and essay, cultural criticism and literary experiment, it begins with a personal trauma-the account of how Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009-but looks outwards as much as inwards for answers.

Skilful and controlled, but also searching and febrile, this is a book that unsettles time and narrative, art and imagination, embodying in form the trauma that it describes. Taking in writers and artists from Vivian Gornick to Robert Burton, David Lynch to Sylvia Plath, LaBarge picks apart the structures of narrative forms to ask how it might be possible to tell the "Good Story", and its aftermath, on its own terms.

About the Author

EMILY LABARGE is a Canadian writer based in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, The London Review of Books, Artforum, Bookforum, Frieze, and The Paris Review, amongst others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns. Dog Days is her first book.

Reviews

"An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous and totally original." Olivia Laing

"Where the worst shocks of life threaten to undermine thought, imagination and literary form, Dog Days patiently, ferociously, insists on new ways to think, imagine and write. I plan to re-read it every time I feel my mind go soft. I found it a challenge, an inspiration-a very cool book." Amber Husain

Book Information
ISBN 9781913512750
Author Emily LaBarge
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Peninsula Press Ltd
Publisher Peninsula Press Ltd