The cover picture alone would make me pick up this book: it is Portrait of a Terrier by the English artist John Rabone Harvey, and it adorns what for me is a 'must-read' - Dog Stories, the very handsome Everyman's Pocket Classics collection edited by Diana Secker Tesdell.
What's inside sounds just as appealing as the anthology includes stories from as diverse a group of writers as Chekhov and Patricia Highsmith, Penelope Lively and P.G. Wodehouse. There are tales from Tobias Wolff and Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury and G.K. Chesterton; "imaginative, lyrical and empathetic portraits of man and woman's most faithful friend."
As a dog-lover I'm looking forward to reading about Kipling's heroically faithful Garm, to O. Henry's tale of a dissatisfied lapdog's escape in Memoirs of a Yellow Dog, and to meeting "an aggressively affectionate three-legged pit bull who lives in a block of flats for dogs" - that's Jonathan Lethem's Ava's Apartment. (I just hope there are no sad ones ...)
I was given this for Christmas a couple of years ago and it's delightful. A wonderful 'dipping in to' book.
Posted by: Victoria Corby | 21 August 2012 at 12:02 PM
This sounds like an excellent Christmas present for my mother (and if I give her it, I can read it as well). It's a lovely cover. I see there's a companion volume, Cat Stories, which would also make a good present.
Posted by: GeraniumCat | 21 August 2012 at 04:25 PM
Aren't these lovely little books? I've collected the old Everyman's Library for years, as well as the little Oxford Classics. When did books turn into such heavy, unwieldy monsters? So hard to hold in the bath or bed and impossible to cram into one's pocket.
My ex-veterinarian, who is my best friend and ex-vet only because I couldn't get her to move to Pennsylvania with me, gave me the Everyman's of dog poems.
Posted by: Joan Kyler | 22 August 2012 at 12:59 PM