Dog Days

Labarge, Emily

/ ISBN 13: 9798893380477

Editore: Transit Books, 2026

New! // A NEW YORK TIMES AND LITERARY HUB MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK Dog Days unfolds in the long shadow of freak violence--where language stammers, time loops, and the body remembers what the mind can't. 'An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous and totally original.'--Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City In 2009, Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage while on vacation. A crocheted blanket was placed over her head while Mrs. Doubtfire and 'Agnus Dei' played on repeat. In the years that follow, a therapist encourages her to lie in exactly the same position, 'just like how it happened, for as long as it happened, and for as long as it takes until the pain comes out'--otherwise it will never leave. She tries to find 'the good story' neat, polite, reassuring. But what happens to the things the good story leaves out? A high-voltage synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory--drawing upon film and writing from Mulholland Drive to It's a Wonderful Life, Virginia Woolf to Janet Malcolm-- Dog Days writes into this question. How do language and institutions constrain and distort our understanding of trauma, violence, and care? How might we write otherwise, telling a story, and its aftermath, on our own terms? The result is not only a prose work but also a practice: an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement, a search for the place where writing becomes a way of surviving. Codice articolo 660983

Riassunto:

Dog Days unfolds in the long shadow of freak violence—where language stammers, time loops, and the body remembers what the mind can’t.

“An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous and totally original.”—Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City 

In 2009, Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage at gunpoint while on vacation. A crocheted blanket was placed over her head while Mrs. Doubtfire and “Agnus Dei” played on repeat.In the years that follow, a therapist encourages her to lie in exactly the same position, “just like how it happened, for as long as it happened, and for as long as it takes until the pain comes out”—otherwise it will never leave. She tries to find “the good story”: the version that doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable, the short-enough one, the one with a moral or punchline. But what happens to the things the good story leaves out? 

An electrifying synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory that draws upon film and writing from Mulholland Drive to It’s a Wonderful Life, Virginia Woolf to Alice Munro, Dog Days channels form into political inquiry: interrogating how language and institutional structures constrain and distort our understandings of trauma, violence, and care. The result is not only a prose work but also a practice: an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement that move beyond our desire for narrative containment, into a place where writing becomes a way of surviving.

Informazioni sull?autore:

1. 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, among others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns. Dog Days is her first book. 

Dati bibliografici

Titolo: Dog Days
Casa editrice: Transit Books
Data di pubblicazione: 2026
Legatura: Trade Paperback
Condizione: New