Angus: A Memoir

"Can you stand, can you even imagine it anymore? Did you ever know it at all: full-fathom fearlessness and the feel of charging away from your own lit windows into the night, charging off on a scent, purely, and the urge that it stirs? Go. Go. And further, and on, with nothing holding you back, no worry, not a second, not even a first thought -- thought that leads to fear and fear to worries and these to clouded thoughts, like the fence-snagged sheep hair of atmosphere that drags tonight in a blue wind about the planet."

A young dog named Angus lies wounded at the edge of a dark wood. In the distance he sees the lights of his owners' cabin. As he starts the long, valiant climb back to them, all the stirring sights, sounds, and scents of his brief but wildly episodic life begin to replay before him.

Born on a farm in Devon called Pollard's Combe, where Charles Siebert and his wife arrive one stormy night to claim him, Angus soon finds himself being whisked off to a multi-sensory array of new destinations: from a small miner's cottage on the Cornish seacoast; to the lighted "room-stacks" of London; to the cargo hold of the "metal bird" that delivers him to Brooklyn; and, finally, to the wild woods of southern Canada, where Angus' irrepressible curiosity and zeal for new experience finally meet their match.

With Angus, Charles Siebert, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral, has performed a singular act of literary ventriloquism -- the autobiography of a dog, a book that offers us a wry, poignant, ultimately redemptive view of life and death as perceived through the heightened senses of one very brave, winsome, unforgettable Jack Russell terrier. At once poetic, thoroughly canine, and unsentimental, Angus is a brilliant feat of the imagination that illuminates our often ambiguous relationship with our fellow creatures, while delivering us to a fuller understanding of the forces that make us all one.

Charles Siebert was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he currently resides. He is the author of the memoir Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral. His poems, essays, and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Outside, and Esquire.