Stanley and Sophie - Hardcover

Jennings, Kate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416560297 ISBN 13: 9781416560296

Publisher: Scribner, 2008

Synopsis

Traces the author's devoted relationship with a pair of border terriers, describing her struggles with widowhood in the aftermath of September 11, her observations about the cultural differences between New York and her native Australia, and the feelings of renewed purpose she experienced through her canine friends. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Kate Jennings, a poet, essayist, and novelist, grew up in the Australian Outback. She attended the University of Sydney in the late 1960s, where she gained notoriety as a feminist activist. She moved to New York City in 1979. Her novel Snake was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, as was Moral Hazard, which was based on her experiences as a Wall Street speech-writer. Her work has been in contention for the Booker, IMPAC, and Los Angeles Times literary prizes. In her native country, she has won the prestigious Christina Stead and Adelaide Festival prizes and was honored with the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1.

A Cappella

Joe Cocker, the rock star, was underestimated, even in his heyday. He had the voice of an angel and the appearance of a mental hospital patient. His signature song, unless you count "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window," was the antiphonal Lennon-McCartney tune "With a Little Help from My Friends," which Cocker made his own by using waltz time and incorporating chorics with raw rock, much as the Rolling Stones did in "You Can't Always Get What You Want." My favorite part: Cocker's girl group carols, "Do you need anybody?" and Cocker confesses with distinctly manly candor, "I need someone to love." Then the girls ask, a cappella, "Would you believe in a love at first sight?" and he answers, "I'm certain that it happens all the time." I always shake my head at this. Doubtful. Very doubtful.

I've been insanely, destructively in love several times in my life, the details of which I'd rather not remember. (Neither adverb is an exaggeration; such was my derangement that certain people still walk out of a room when I walk into it. My excuse: I was young; it was the sixties; derangement, courtesy of R. D. Laing, had cachet.) And I was married for many years to a man for whom, I always said, I would walk a crooked mile. But love at first sight? No. The only time I've fallen in love at first sight was with dogs.

The first was Stanley, an aristocratic alpha male border terrier. Best of breed, pure princeling. (Kennel name: Bramblebee Borage, out of Wizard Notice of Bramblebee and Faithful One of Bramblebee.) The second was Sophie, a streetwise, scrappy, orphaned alpha female, also a border terrier, not to be confused with a border collie, an altogether different kind of dog. In my love for these two dogs lies a tale about human need, the kind that blots out all sense -- in this case, the sense of having two rivalrous terriers with more volatility and energy than the ocean in a New York City apartment. Human need -- immense subject.

And because Stanley came into my life in 2001 and Sophie in 2004, it's a tale, tangentially, about Manhattan in those first confounding, politically charged years of the new millennium. Years when our lives were a rhubarb of noisy emotion: a devil's chorus of fear, blatting rage, birring anxiety, tweedling incredulity, roupy sorrow.

Copyright © 2008 by Kate Jennings

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1416560297
• ISBN 13: 9781416560296
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 177