Dog Culture: Writers On The Character Of Canines

by Ken Foster (Editor)

Overview

"Intelligent and witty. .. the writers clearly love dogs." -Dog World

"A worthwhile treat." -Dog Fancy

"Wonderful writing about the emotional geography between dogs and people." -Jon Katz
DOG CULTURE showcases celebrated contemporary writers and the dogs in their lives. Here are best-selling authors Nicholas Dawidoff, on needing obedience school as much as his dog, and Chuck Palahniuk, on the otherworldly job of rescue dogs. Rene Steinke describes the shameful gluttony of her boyfriend's dog; Pearl Abraham writes of sneaking a dog into her life in defiance of the Chassidic community in which she was raised; and Chris Offutt reminisces about the Kentucky dog of his childhood, locked out of the house, injured with buckshot, but still deeply loved. Elissa Schappell gives us the other side of the coin in her hilarious treatise against dogs.

Like the best writing on anything, each of these pieces are both about specific dogs and about all dogs, and, most importantly, about something bigger and more essential than dogs themselves: life, and how we choose to live it. With black-and-white images of the inscrutable canines that inhabit our landscape, this book will surprise and entrance, and make even the most skeptical dog observer see the world in a new way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781592285389
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	10/01/2004
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

KEN FOSTER is the author of The Kind I'm Likely to Get, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and editor of The KGB Bar Reader, the anthology Harper's called, "one of the strongest collections of new writing available." He has written for The New York Times Book Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, McSweeney's, and others. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Sewanee Writers Conference, Foster lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his two dogs.

Read an Excerpt

Coco ate: popcorn, hair pomade, dirty kitty litter, Twinkies, red Chanel lip stick, used tea bags, spaghetti, sandalwood soap, Cheerios, orange peels, ham, cream cheese, though, oddly, never leather or shoes. His lunges for food came to seem like a performance. Punk Rock: Coco growling and grabbing a bagel in his teeth even as I shouted, "No!" Comic: Coco carrying a nail file in his mouth for blocks, refusing to accept the fact that it was tasteless. Existential: the long face and the tail lowered because the one lousy piece of stale bread had been beyond the reach of his leash.
We fed Coco what he needed to stay healthy, but he wanted more. There is something to be said for a vigorous and not too discriminating appetite. He wanted danger, sweetness, blood, strangeness, adventure, salt. Who could blame him? I came to see that part of the pleasure of having a dog is the empathic part, recognizing those sensitivities that we usually think of as human, but another pleasure is in a dog's beastliness. A dog acts like a dog, and I'll admit that I took a vicarious pleasure in watching Coco get the fish skin out of the restaurant's garbage. He was so happy with himself, his tail wagging, devoutly licking and savoring the luminous skin between his paws.

Table of Contents

"What Coco Ate" by René Steinke * "Pompey the Great" by Chris Offutt *"Those Dog Beds Are Dope" by T Cooper * "Fear of the Other" by Pearl Abraham * "Sparky the Fire Dog" by Brent Hoff * "Girl Dog Mom" by Terese Svoboda * "How to Be Alone" by Ken Foster * "The Dog Guilt Trip" by Nicholas Dawidoff * "New York is For the Dogs" by Hillary Rosner * "And They Call It Puppy Love" by Elissa Schappell * "Bohdisattvas" by Chuck Palahniuk * "You and Me, Breathing" by Annie Bruno

Editorial Reviews

"Intelligent and witty...the writers clearly love dogs." —Dog World
Rated three bones: "A worthwhile treat." —Dog Fancy
"Wonderful writing about the emotional geography between dogs and people." —Jon Katz

From the Publisher