Emily LaBarge
Dog Days
Transit Books, 2026<\/p>\n
Dog Days sits beyond the clarity of a good story, an easy plot that is rehearsed and narrated and constructed and demanded and peddled. This complicates the form of a review, with its insistence on summary: a couple of quick lines that place us, face down, on one side for seven hours, in the same hostage situation that this book is and isn\u2019t about.<\/p>\n
Writing around \u201cthe ordinary extraordinary event\u201d her family survived nearly two decades ago, Emily LaBarge leads with the incoherence of traumatic recall. \u201cI see a flash and movement in the corner of my vision and suddenly the men are there,\u201d she starts. \u201cI did not hear them coming. Maybe I heard them coming. I did. I did not.\u201d She backs this fragmented narrative with a rich synthesis of theory, psychology, and literary analysis, along with a record of dreams. LaBarge\u2019s research pursues lines of thinking that are surprising until they aren\u2019t: A mesmerising section on our experience of time compares theories of presentism and eternalism, amplifying the way traumatic feedback loops strand us across different temporalities. \u201cTrauma, along with its recovery,\u201d she writes, \u201cis the ultimate experience of both this will last forever and this will happen again anytime and anywhere.\u201d In its capacity to hold these various, sometimes contradictory truths, Dog Days resists the sense of control implied by standard narratives\u2014the polite fantasy of our own omniscience. Instead, LaBarge\u2019s debut memoir turns to the potential of language as it fractures along an act of violence, reorienting us to ourselves and how that self might be more fully expressed.<\/p>\n
An impression of \u201cwhat happened\u201d is ultimately achieved through revision, each turn snagging against some slight variation, redacted bits, a rhythm of X\u2019s to stand in for the things beyond speech. Between the gaps, images clarify into a sudden presence: \u201cI remember a hand pressing hard to the ground to see if it was real. I remember this hand being my hand and looking at it, watching to see what it would do.\u201d<\/p>\n
I cried the first time I read this, on a too early flight next to teenagers who cracked stale beers into the pressurised cabin. Beyond any climactic arc, there\u2019s the quiet recognition, trailed by disbelief, of having arrived at your own epitaph. The sense of helplessness\u2014that ultimate fear\u2014is sharp in memory, despite the linguistic attempt at distance. The almost childlike wonder of the action and its narration stuns me. I\u2019m reminded of the impossible questions carried by children in Gaza, recorded by the Palestine Trauma Centre UK, which I came to through Selma Dabbagh\u2019s writing in the London Review of Books. They are marked by a similar anticipation: \u201cAfter we die, will I hear your voice? When I die, will they put me in a grave with my mom and dad?\u201d What happens to a life that has come this close, to a generation and the generations after?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Emily LaBargeDog DaysTransit Books, 2026 Dog Days sits beyond the clarity of a good story, an easy plot…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256100,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-256099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}