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Afterglow
- Author
- Eileen Myles
- Narrator
- Eileen Myles
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date
- 5 December 2017
- Run Time
- 5 hours
- Format
- Audiobook
- Genre
- Memoirs, Dogs as pets
What to expect
Prolific and widely renowned, Eileen Myles is a trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work “set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match” (New York Review of Books). This newest book paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of a beloved confidant: the pit bull called Rosie.
In 1990, Myles chose Rosie from a litter on the street, and their connection instantly became central to the writer’s life and work. During the course of their sixteen years together, Myles was madly devoted to the dog’s well-being, especially in her final days. Starting from the emptiness following Rosie’s death, Afterglow launches a heartfelt and fabulist investigation into the true nature of the bond between pet and pet owner. Through this lens, we witness Myles’ experiences with intimacy and spirituality, celebrity and politics, alcoholism and recovery, fathers and family history, as well as the fantastical myths we spin to get to the heart of grief.
Moving from an imaginary talk show where Rosie is interviewed by Myles’ childhood puppet to a critical reenactment of the night Rosie mated with another pit bull, from lyrical transcriptions of their walks to Rosie’s enlightened narration from the afterlife, Afterglow illuminates all that it can mean when we dedicate our existence to a dog.
Critics Review
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“A ravishingly strange and gorgeous book about a dog that’s really about life and everything there is.”
Helen Macdonald, New York Times bestselling author
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“Part elegy, part meditation, part performance art…poignant, sweeping.”
O, The Oprah Magazine
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“A punk devotional, shot through with a sort of divine attention to material reality and a poet’s associative leaps.”
New Yorker
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“Unflinching but also irrepressibly humorous…Myles possesses, in abundance, two qualities of the highest value for a writer, irreverence and relentless curiosity, and here both are on full display…By turns playful, heartfelt, wise, compassionate, fantastical, and audaciously confessional.”
New York Times Book Review
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“Wry, far-flung, and wonderfully loving.”
Boston Globe
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“Fantastical…wrenching….obsession becomes a way to process grief.”
Rolling Stone
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“A mutt elegy in a million…Myles gets at…the sense of wordless connection and spiritual expansion you feel when you love and are loved by a creature who’s not human.”
NPR
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“A poetic and very personal recount of all a dog can offer in companionship…This is not for the casual prose-appreciator. Myles has a style weaving in and out of traditional poetry, forcing you to take a step and re-evaluate. Pretty apt for 2018.”
BookRiot
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“Myles works to bridge the power discrepancies between owner and dog, author and subject.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
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“Gets inside the glorious, edifying perversity of the human-canine relationship like no other book I’ve ever seen…with none of the corn syrup you might expect from the words ‘dog memoir.’”
Stranger (Seattle), a Top Book of 2017
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"[A] sincere elegiac reflection on a life shared with another being.”
Vice
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“The universal theme of attachment shines through.”
Portland Press Herald
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Eileen Myles
- Narrator
- Eileen Myles
- Duration
- 5 hours
- Release Date
- 5 December 2017
- ISBN
- 9781538517550
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Genre
- Memoirs, Dogs as pets
Synopsis
Prolific and widely renowned, Eileen Myles is a trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work “set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match” (New York Review of Books). This newest book paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of a beloved confidant: the pit bull called Rosie.In 1990, Myles chose Rosie from a litter on the street, and their connection instantly became central to the writer’s life and work. During the course of their sixteen years together, Myles was madly devoted to the dog’s well-being, especially in her final days. Starting from the emptiness following Rosie’s death, Afterglow launches a heartfelt and fabulist investigation into the true nature of the bond between pet and pet owner. Through this lens, we witness Myles’ experiences with intimacy and spirituality, celebrity and politics, alcoholism and recovery, fathers and family history, as well as the fantastical myths we spin to get to the heart of grief.Moving from an imaginary talk show where Rosie is interviewed by Myles’ childhood puppet to a critical reenactment of the night Rosie mated with another pit bull, from lyrical transcriptions of their walks to Rosie’s enlightened narration from the afterlife, Afterglow illuminates all that it can mean when we dedicate our existence to a dog.
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