The Oldest Bitch Alive

For fans of Sigrid Nunez's The Friend and Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, a polyphonic debut following an aging French bulldog and the parasitic worms that send her toward death - a singular, sly novel about form, freedom, interiors, and the matter by which we are composed and consumed.

Gelsomina is an elderly French bulldog who lives in a glass house in the mountains. Paned by transparency, she's lived in imitations-of the man and the woman, of the younger dog, Zampano, of the wild unknown beyond the windows. One day, Gelsomina accidentally ingests an orb of parasitic worms. Approaching death, and filled with new life, she begins to see everything differently. She makes changes in the pattern of her days, and the glass house fractures into many voices. The worms burrowing into Gelsomina regard her body as an imperfect structure, the home they inherited but did not dream of. The couple-Wendy, in interiors, and John, in architectural design-face the claws of human attachment, and what our will to domesticate means for the life of an animal who can see the wild, but never know it. Day's architectural instincts breath into Gelsomina's new and panting life meditations on animal suicide, string theory, philosophical approaches to form, and the question of whether a glass house can ever be a home. The Oldest Bitch Alive tails Gelsomina into one final, ecstatic sprint through the invisible fence and into a wilderness she's never seen-activating the depths of attachment, reverence, death, and the bounded self in dichromatic color.