Four-Legged Fictions

World Literature Today’s July/August issue features our four-legged friends, dogs to be more exact. Esther Tusquets, Mark Tredinnick, Jean Rolin, and Jacques Roubaud each contribute a piece about dogs. The section is titled “Four-Legged Fictions: Writers and Their Canine Characters.” Here is a small sampling from Tredinnick’s “On Hamock Hill”:

This is my devotion, then: to walk sometimes
                                     with the dog through the sclerophyll
Cathedral of the morning. To let myself
Off my lead and follow a half-made track,
                                                 thinking a dilapidated liturgy,
Through bracken fern and native raspberry, three kinds
Of gum and a hundred kinds of weed,
                                                 toward nowhere in particular.