Stanley and Sophie - Softcover

Jennings, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416560300 ISBN 13: 9781416560302

Publisher: Scribner, 2009

Synopsis

Now in paperback, a wise and moving book about two border terriers and the woman who lost her heart to them.

“If Stanley had been a tad less overbearing and Sophie a tad more submissive, everything would have been fine rather than a roller-coaster of high drama and hurt feelings. The dynamic—part gender, part sibling—was familiar: I’d lived it. How did it come about that I was spending my days adjudicat- ing between two dogs who were acting out the story of my life?”
 
Award-winning  author  Kate  Jennings  is a  fiercely  intelligent  writer,  an  astute observer  of  people  and  her  surround- ings,  an  irascible  Australian  with  no  time  for indulgent New Yorkers and their pampered pets, and a recent widow not yet ready to face her grief. 

Then she meets Stanley, “a tense bundle of muscle and sinew that stood seventeen inches high,” and her unexpected love affair began. Swept off her feet and surprised by the depth of her love, Jennings’s life is sud- denly overtaken by two border terriers: Stanley, and then a few years later, Sophie. First and foremost, Stanley & Sophie is a book about animals, understanding them, doing the best by them. But it is also a book about the way two rival- rous, demanding, idiosyncratic, exhilarating dogs gave Jennings
daily purpose and showed her the way to her own heart.

About this title

About the Author:

Kate Jennings, a poet, essayist, and novelist, grew up in the Australian Outback. She attended the University of Sydney in the late 1960s, where she gained notoriety as a feminist activist. She moved to New York City in 1979. Her novel Snake was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, as was Moral Hazard, which was based on her experiences as a Wall Street speech-writer. Her work has been in contention for the Booker, IMPAC, and Los Angeles Times literary prizes. In her native country, she has won the prestigious Christina Stead and Adelaide Festival prizes and was honored with the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1.

A Cappella

Joe Cocker, the rock star, was underestimated, even in his heyday. He had the voice of an angel and the appearance of a mental hospital patient. His signature song, unless you count "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window," was the antiphonal Lennon-McCartney tune "With a Little Help from My Friends," which Cocker made his own by using waltz time and incorporating chorics with raw rock, much as the Rolling Stones did in "You Can't Always Get What You Want." My favorite part: Cocker's girl group carols, "Do you need anybody?" and Cocker confesses with distinctly manly candor, "I need someone to love." Then the girls ask, a cappella, "Would you believe in a love at first sight?" and he answers, "I'm certain that it happens all the time." I always shake my head at this. Doubtful. Very doubtful.

I've been insanely, destructively in love several times in my life, the details of which I'd rather not remember. (Neither adverb is an exaggeration; such was my derangement that certain people still walk out of a room when I walk into it. My excuse: I was young; it was the sixties; derangement, courtesy of R. D. Laing, had cachet.) And I was married for many years to a man for whom, I always said, I would walk a crooked mile. But love at first sight? No. The only time I've fallen in love at first sight was with dogs.

The first was Stanley, an aristocratic alpha male border terrier. Best of breed, pure princeling. (Kennel name: Bramblebee Borage, out of Wizard Notice of Bramblebee and Faithful One of Bramblebee.) The second was Sophie, a streetwise, scrappy, orphaned alpha female, also a border terrier, not to be confused with a border collie, an altogether different kind of dog. In my love for these two dogs lies a tale about human need, the kind that blots out all sense -- in this case, the sense of having two rivalrous terriers with more volatility and energy than the ocean in a New York City apartment. Human need -- immense subject.

And because Stanley came into my life in 2001 and Sophie in 2004, it's a tale, tangentially, about Manhattan in those first confounding, politically charged years of the new millennium. Years when our lives were a rhubarb of noisy emotion: a devil's chorus of fear, blatting rage, birring anxiety, tweedling incredulity, roupy sorrow.

Copyright © 2008 by Kate Jennings

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1416560300
• ISBN 13: 9781416560302
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208