Dog Stories — Diana Secker Tesdell

Dog Stories rounds up a pack of vivid and colorful stories about man's best friend by a wide range of great writers, from Mark Twain and Anton Chekhov to Patricia Highsmith and Jonathan Lethem.

The richly drawn and unforgettable canines gathered here include Rudyard Kipling's heroically faithful “Garm,” Bret Harte's irrepressible scoundrel of a “Yellow Dog,” and the aggressively affectionate three-legged pit bull Ava, who lives in an apartment building for dogs in Jonathan Lethem's “Ava's Apartment.” Here are stories that touchingly illuminate the dog's role in the emotional lives of humans, such as Tobias Wolff's “Her Dog,” in which a widower shares his grief for his wife with her grieving pet. Here, too, are humorous glimpses of the canine point of view, from O. Henry's tale of a dissatisfied lapdog's escape to P. G. Wodehouse's cheerfully naïve watchdog who simply wants everybody to get along. These writers and others -- Ray Bradbury, Doris Lessing, Thomas McGuane, Rick Bass, James Salter, and Penelope Lively among them -- offer imaginative, lyrical, and empathetic portraits of humanity's most devoted companion.