Dog Culture: Writers on the Character of Canines

"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.