Author: Emily LaBarge
Publisher: Peninsula
Paperback
Burley Fisher Books of the Year 2025
Lu says… Emily LaBarge writes with precision and through an intimate lens that is at times painful to read and as a reader also feels like an invitation for self-reflexivity and embodying her questioning; Dog Days considers why we tell stories the way we do, how we frame memory – how one remembers a memory – and how we might tell events and their feelings otherwise. Combining memoir and essay, cultural criticism and literary experiment – LaBarge is a wonderful reader as well as writer, interlacing references and responses to literary contemporaries in an erudite manner – it begins with a personal trauma but looks outwards as much as inwards for answers. This work powerfully presents the murky areas where language stammers, time loops, and the body remembers what the mind can’t.