Dog Days: A Memoir

Emily Labarge

New
Book cover for Dog Days: A Memoir
Image for variant 9798893380477
Book cover for Dog Days: A Memoir
Image for variant 9798893380477

Dog Days: A Memoir

Dog Days: A Memoir

Emily Labarge

View full details

Description

Combining memoir and essay, cultural criticism and literary experiment, an electrifying account of living with and writing about trauma from a singular new voice in Canadian literature.

Taking as its starting point a harrowing event in which the writer and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009, Dog Days expands prismatically to trace the paths of trauma in the incident's aftermath.

Braiding the narrative with poetry and dreams and bringing her experience into conversation with the voices of literary and artistic influences--from Sylvia Plath to Dora Maar to David Lynch--LaBarge provides readers with a richer, somatic understanding of trauma and how it resists the easy container of narrative.

Interspersed in her rigorous searching are memories of what she survived, told with visceral sensory detail and in a voice that in its frankness, intimacy, and vulnerability refuses to let the reader look away. The result is as profoundly intelligent as it is deeply moving, a book unlike any other and one destined to become an essential text.

About the Author

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.


Critical Reviews

"A book that really should not be skipped."--Joumana Khatib, The New York Times

"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

"An enactment of the struggle to translate trauma into language... You haven't read anything like it."--Literary Hub

"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

"A singular mix of memoir and criticism."--Publishers Weekly

"Haunting and questing meditations on life, art, dreams, and death... A trauma narrative that extends and subverts the very notion of trauma narrative."--Kirkus Reviews

"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, author of The Undying

"Emily LaBarge is always intellectually agile and emotionally capacious."--Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk

"Embracing disorientation as a formal strategy, Dog Days locates a sympathy between traumatic experience and the practice of writing itself...[LaBarge] demonstrates that trauma entails its own mystical mode of reading, in which words and images become imbued with supra-rational connection and significance. "--Daisy Lafarge, Frieze

"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, author of This Dark Country

"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

Publishing Information

Publisher: Transit Books
Pub date: 2026-05-19
Length: 280 pages

The Allstora Membership

Membership Perks:

  • Save 30% on all online store purchases
  • Exclusive access to author's content
  • You pay less, but authors still earn double

Membership Terms:

First Month: $0.00
Monthly price: $5.00
  • To access membership discount simply log in and add to cart, discount applied automatically.
  • One month free trial, cancel anytime. Membership renews on the 15th of each month.