Dogs

We meet 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 find sex, and what she thinks is love, with Leon, a charismatic older photographer. For Dora, this is her first great romance, but for Leon, she is little more than a wraith of his dead wife. Dogs is propelled by the millennial notion that everything is possible, so long as you strike the right poses. Dwelling in the student bars of Prague and the off-season coastline of Cádiz, Spain, this sultry story makes all too clear that intentions and passion are all too often tangled in dark energy and ego. But 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. "I watched the cigarette burn down between my fingers. Words were choking me, scratching the inside of my throat, wanting out, but stuck—stupid words, words too thick. We sat beside the bloodstain like two strangers separated by plexiglass in an infectious diseases ward. Afraid of infecting each other with misunderstanding, both contagiously obsessed with ourselves, but lonely enough to accept the bizarre coexistence, life beside a bloodstain. I stared at the protruding bones of his spine and had a strange feeling, like suddenly, physically, I no longer existed, could hear and see everything that was happening, but wasn’t physically present. I was invisible. No one could see or hear me, because in truth I had nothing to say. Except to repeat her name, the only thing I really knew about him, the badge sewn onto his suit that determined his belonging and his future among a heap of unidentified victims. The whole of her was written on his face, his personal archaeology of pain was her. Ayna. Ayna, Ayna, Ayna. The entire night, you were there with us in bed, between us like a pillow mite, inside him, inside me, reflected on my face through his eyes, in our scents, in the wood of the floorboards beneath the mattress, in the armchair in the corner of the room. You looked happy, as if at any moment you would get up, walk over, and lie down between us, kiss him, then me." Dora Šustic 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 Polić Kamov Award for the best literary work of the year. Ena Selimović is a writer, translator, and editor. She cofounded Turkoslavia, a translation collective and journal. Her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, Asymptote, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in comparative literature and has been awarded fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Arts.