Dog Days considers why we tell stories the way we do, and how we might tell them otherwise. Combining memoir and essay, cultural criticism and literary experiment, it begins with a personal trauma – the account of how Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009 – but looks outwards as much as inwards for answers. Skilful and controlled, but also searching and febrile, this is a book that unsettles time and narrative, art and imagination, embodying in form the trauma that it describes. Taking in writers and artists from Vivian Gornick to Robert Burton, David Lynch to Sylvia Plath, LaBarge picks apart the structures of narrative forms to ask how it might be possible to tell the ‘Good Story’, and its aftermath, on its own terms.