The forty-three lovingly crafted vignettes within The Difficulty of Being a Dog dig elegantly to the center of a long, mysterious, and often intense relationship: that between human beings and dogs. In doing so, Roger Grenier introduces us to dogs real and literary, famous and reviled-from Ulysses’s Argos to Freud’s Lün to the hundreds of dogs exiled from Constantinople in 1910 and deposited on a desert island-and gives us a sense of what makes our relationships with them so meaningful.