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The Difficulty of Being a Dog

Translated by Alice Kaplan
The forty-three lovingly crafted vignettes within The Difficulty of Being a Dog dig elegantly to the center of a long, mysterious, and often intense relationship: that between human beings and dogs. In doing so, Roger Grenier introduces us to dogs real and literary, famous and reviled—from Ulysses’s Argos to Freud’s Lün to the hundreds of dogs exiled from Constantinople in 1910 and deposited on a desert island—and gives us a sense of what makes our relationships with them so meaningful.

Read an excerpt, The Walk down the Rue du Bac.


139 pages | 5-1/4 x 8 | © 2002

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory

Table of Contents

Preface
An Enigma
The Difficulty of Being a Dog
A Reproachful Glance
The World of Odors
Low Life
Dogs’ Paradise
A Dog with a Past
Flaubert, from Python to Parrot
The Walk down the Rue du Bac
To Be Loved
A dog, yes, but...
Friends of Animals
Our Great Men
Heroes and Refugees
Larbaud, or Bourgeois Follies
Identification
Vocation
Fantasies, Symbols, Signals
Metaphysics
Voltaire versus Rousseau
First Prize
Animal-Machines
Modestine
Gaston Febus
Two Hunters
The Brutes
To the East
The Island of Oxias
Enemies
Evolution
Questions of Vocabulary
A Dog’s Heart
Dreams after Ulysses’ Death
Flush
The Fiancèe of Goering’s Dog
On Pure Love
Misanthropes
Dog and Cat
The Night in Hendaye
Debtors
Dino, Queneau’s Dog
Horse, Goat, Dog
The Dog-Book
Translator’s Note

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