Dog Days

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 outward as much as inward 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.

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

‘Emily LaBarge renders trauma as a lived experience, and so Dog Days is not merely a trauma study, of which there are many, but also a unique literary experience. Dog Days is rich in ideas. A fascinating work, unusually conceived and written, disturbing, honest, and profound.’ Lynne Tillman

'Dog Days is a book about the relentless presentness of the past and the philosophical vertigo that follows a harrowing life-altering event. What emerges is a profound and necessary inquiry into how we assemble a self from the fragments of what we’ve read, what we’ve seen, and what we’ve survived.' Anne Boyer

'Emily LaBarge is always intellectually agile and emotionally capacious.' Deborah Levy

‘An expansive, invigorating and compassionate book. LaBarge analyses a wide-range of art and literature with a deftness, boldness and generosity that reminded me of the best Susan Sontag. I look forward to pressing this into the hands of all my friends.’ Rebecca Birrell

'An extraordinary work of writing; a profound odyssey of bringing into the shared space of language what dwells beyond its margins. The writing illuminates architectures of pain, repetition, and shifting temporalities, in a singular light that somehow manages to make the great fiction, poetry, film, art, it reflects upon even richer. A book that has such intensely stunning passages that I miss as soon as I have finished reading them.' Tai Shani

‘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

‘An expansive and beautiful meditation on trauma and its styles, but also how reading and looking and gathering and writing, as a practice of co-creation with the perceptual, sustains our existence—this too is lived experience.’ Lucy Mercer