The Audio Series: Dog On Fire

 

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen."  was originally hatched in a NYC club during BEA back in 2012. It's a fun little series, where authors record themselves reading an excerpt from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.

Today, Terese Svoboda reads from the first chapter of her book Dog on Fire. The author of 19 books of poetry, fiction, biography, memoir and translation, Terese has won the Guggenheim, the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Poetry Prize, an NEH translation grant, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation video prize, the O. Henry Award for the short story, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. Her opera WET premiered at L.A.'s Disney Hall. Her most recent book, Theatrix: Poetry Plays was named one of the best of 2021. Roxy and Coco, my 20th book, 8th novel, will be published in 2024. Dog on Fire is the fourth book she's published in five years in four genres.

Click on the soundcloud bar below to hear Terese read an excerpt from the book:

Everyone likes ghost stories – except Dog on Fire isn't exactly that. Imagine a sad-funny elegy, Cather channeling Saunders, with infusions of sly wit. Imagine a sibling who is so inscrutable he seems to be from another family entirely, who dies before you get to know him. Of course the family in Dog on Fire's dysfunctional: an alcoholic mother who carves wax guns, a father whose passion is smoking anything vaguely edible, a sister who hears her dead brother in door molding. A dreadful dust storm gets the book off to a good start with the glimpse of the shovel-wielding ghost. What Dog on Fire does best is haunt, and its succinct almost-poetry seeks to enchant you.

"A contemporary “Dustbowl Gothic” novel.” – Rone Shavers, author of Silverfish
"Haunting and darkly witty reckoning.”-- Dawn Raffel, author of Boundless as the Sky
"Thrillingly alive to this bewildering moment."-- Rene Steinke, author of Friendswood