Dog Days
Dog Days
Emily LaBarge
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.
Praise for Dog Days:
“A stunning memoir... It’s a testament to LaBarge’s gifts as a writer that she can make even the most complex and cerebral ideas feel urgent and alive. Dog Days begins with the lonely violence of waiting to die with a crocheted blanket over her head and ends with a commitment to engage with the world. ‘What happens to you happens to me happens to everyone and everything’: We all share the stubborn fact of our mortality.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“A book that really should not be skipped.”—Joumana Khatib, The New York Times
“Restless and kaleidoscopic… a peculiar, energizing archaeology of violence.”—Jamie Hood, Bookforum
“Roving, erudite... LaBarge’s analyses are so clean and compelling that she is almost over my shoulder, directing my attention here and then there.”—Rebecca Peng, Toronto Review
“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
"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
"A memoir, exploded… one that turns the blurred lens of memory and trauma back on the reader.”—Spencer Williams, The Chicago Review of Books
“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
"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
“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
Product Info
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Nonfiction
Paperback | 5.25 x 8 | 280 Pages
Rights: US
9798893380477