Who will keep you warm when the moon is high and the nights are long and cold? Pam Houston would recommend a good dog. He might drool, smell a little gamey after a romp in the rain, and eat the occasional flattened squirrel, but he’ll adore you unconditionally and enjoy nothing in the world so much as your companionship. Houston has styled herself as a literary rough-and-ready adventure girl, writing wry and outdoorsy short fiction like the collection “Cowboys Are My Weakness” and magazine essays about her life as a hunter, ski instructor, Colorado ranch owner, Amazon River guide, and owner of an oft-broken heart. But much of her work can be boiled down to simple girl-and-her-dog tales, in which the men leave and the heroine is left to walk the trail with a loyal hound by her side. Her first novel, Sight Hound, follows a woman and her pack of human companions as they go to great lengths to extend the life of a beloved canine. With both humor and painful truths, Houston exposes the primacy of the dog-owner connection, and explains why animals often make better friends than humans.
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