Dogs - by Dora Sustic (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

We meet the protagonist of Dogs, Dora, on a train, traveling to Prague where she will attend film school in the hopes that she will get everything she wants from life: "knowledge, freedom, sex, work, success, love, and money." It does not take long for Dora to discover sex, and what she thinks is love, in the form of a charismatic older photographer. For Dora, this is her first great true love, but for him, she is little more than a wraith of his great lost love.

Dogs is propelled by the millennial notion that everything is possible, so long as you strike the right poses. But the gripping story makes all too clear that intentions and passion all too often are tangled in dark energy and ego. Nonetheless, what is life, and the larger world, if it isn't lived to the fullest by each individual? It is this universal question that makes Dora's journey through Dogs so appealing, and revealing.

About the Author

Ena Selimovic is a Yugoslav-born writer and co-founder of Turkoslavia, a translation collective and journal. Her work has appeared in the Periodical of the Modern Language Association, Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others, and has received support from the American Literary Translators Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

Dora Sustic (1991) is a writer, film director, and screenwriter. She graduated in political science from the University of Ljubljana and earned an M.A. in screenwriting at FAMU in Prague. Her essays, poems, reviews, and short stories have appeared in regional and international literary journals. Dogs, her debut novel, won the Drago Gervais Prize for Best Unpublished Manuscript and it was a finalist for the 2023 Janko Polic Kamov Award for the best literary work of the year.