Dog Days by Emily LaBarge

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. 

Skillful 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.

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.

‘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