Join Emily LaBarge for an exclusive evening to celebrate the launch of her newly anticipated book, Dog Days.  The evening will begin with a reading and a discussion between LaBarge and writer and translator Polly Barton. The book launch will be followed by a delicious autumnal feast prepared by Emmeline Café.

Dog Days considers why we tell stories the way we do, and how we might tell them otherwise. Combining memoir and essay, cultural criticism and literary experiment, it begins with a personal trauma—the account of how Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009—but looks outward as much as inward for answers.

Skilful and controlled, but also searching and febrile, this is a book that unsettles time and narrative, art and imagination, embodying in form the trauma that it describes. Taking in writers and artists from Vivian Gornick to Robert Burton, David Lynch to Sylvia Plath, LaBarge picks apart the structures of narrative forms to ask how it might be possible to tell the “Good Story,” and its aftermath, on its own terms.

Dog Days is available to pre-order from East Bristol Books and available to buy on the evening at Spike Island.

Tickets
Book Launch and Supper Club — £28
Book Launch event only — £7

Menu
Roast pumpkin & Spinach Dahl (gf & ve)
Vegetable Samosa (ve)
Cucumber, Lemon & Mint Yoghurt (gf)
Mango & Lime Chutney (gf & ve)
Turmeric Basmati Rice (gf & ve)

Warm Toffee Apple Cake with Cream

A drink will be included

EMILY LABARGE is a Canadian writer based in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, The London Review of Books, Artforum, Bookforum, Frieze, and The Paris Review, amongst others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns. Dog Days (Peninsula Press, 2025) is her first book.

POLLY BARTON is a literary translator and writer. Her translations from Japanese to English include the bestselling Butter  by Asako Yuzuki (HarperCollins Press, 2024), The Woman Dies and Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Europa Editions, 2025), and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025). Her English-language translation of Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (Penguin, 2025) was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. Barton has also written the books Fifty Sounds (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021) and Porn: An Oral History (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023), and her debut novel What am I, a Deer? is out in 2026 (Fitzcarraldo Editions).

‘An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous and totally original.’ Olivia Laing

‘Dog Days is a book about the relentless presentness of the past and the philosophical vertigo that follows a harrowing life-altering event. What emerges is a profound and necessary inquiry into how we assemble a self from the fragments of what we’ve read, what we’ve seen, and what we’ve survived.’ Anne Boyer

‘An extraordinary work of writing; a profound odyssey of bringing into the shared space of language what dwells beyond its margins. The writing illuminates architectures of pain, repetition, and shifting temporalities, in a singular light that somehow manages to make the great fiction, poetry, film, art, it reflects upon even richer. A book that has such intensely stunning passages that I miss as soon as I have finished reading them.’ Tai Shani