Explaining Death To The Dog

by Susan Perabo

A Beverly Hills actor must protect his neighbours from his own father, who has taken up jewel theft in his old age. A bored wife spends all her inheritance at an auction. Two straight-A students murder the school bully. This collection of stories draws on the bizarre and the hilarious.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

Paperback

First published July 1, 1999

About the author

Susan Perabo is the author of two novels, "The Fall of Lisa Bellow" and "The Broken Places," and two collections of short stories, "Why They Run the Way They Do" and "Who I Was Supposed to Be." Her fiction has been anthologized in "Best American Short Stories," "Pushcart Prize Stories," and "New Stories from the South," and has appeared in numerous magazines, including One Story, Glimmer Train, Story, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and The Sun. She is Writer in Residence and Professor of Creative Writing at Dickinson College and on the faculty of the Queens University low-residency MFA program.

Reviews

[Erin Britton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Susan Perabo is right up there with Etgar Keret and Junot Diaz as one of the greatest writers of short stories of modern times. In Explaining Death to the Dog, Perabo takes ordinary people living mundane lives and gives them each an extra dimension of the utterly bizarre, whether it be a depressed mother who gambles away her life savings or a data processing clerk who blows her savings on a dress previously owned by Princess Diana or even a reunion between a Hollywood star with marital problems and his kleptomaniac father. A delightful modern classic.

[SadieReadsAgain · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't have any expectations for this book, but I was really surprised. Surprised both by the maturity of the themes and author's voice, and also surprised by the strength of each story. I don't think there was a dud in the whole collection, and the title story will probably always stay with me.