In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Eleanor Lerman’s collection King the Wonder Dog is filled with moving stories of loneliness and the power of animals to assuage our pain.
Foreword Reviews wrote of the book:
“The poignant short story collection King the Wonder Dog is infused with retrospective melancholy.”
In her own words, here is Eleanor Lerman’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection King the Wonder Dog:
When Leonard Cohen was an old man, his manager embezzled all his money. He was heartbroken about this—not for himself but because he’d wanted to leave something for his children (even though they told him he’d been a wonderful father and they didn’t need money to remember that). So, after not singing in public for many years, he went on tour and in his dark, rusty voice, sang his beautiful songs, old ones and new ones—and audiences around the world stood, cried, and applauded him because they wanted to show him how much they loved him and how much his music and his poetry meant to them. I’ve loved his poetry from the time I was a young teenager and even though I didn’t get to see him perform then, in my heart I was applauding him, too. And I still thank him for the poetry he wrote that taught me how to write, too. My new collection of short fiction, King the Wonder Dog: and Other Stories [She Writes Press; April 7, 2026], is my love letter to the healing power of animals.
“Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen
I have often written about how I owe my writing career to Leonard Cohen and, in particular, to this song. When I was about sixteen, living a very unhappy life in a near-forgotten beach town, I found Cohen’s first book of poetry, The Spice-Box of Earth, on a rack of books in a drug store. I only picked it up because I had heard his song, “Suzanne,” on the radio—I had no idea he was a poet. Anyway, I read the book on a bus ride back to my house and by the time that fifteen-minute trip was over, I knew what I was going to do with my life: I was going to be a poet, too, and that has been the core of my work over a career that now spans over fifty years. In the story, “Moon in the Morning,” from the King the Wonder Dog collection, Anders, who was brought up in a large family of boys on the plains of Alberta, Canada, is the only one in his family who knows he is different, as I knew I was different from everyone I grew up with, and he understands that he has a deep-seated drive to be a painter, so he leaves his family, leaves home, moves to New York City, and follows that calling. He’s never particularly successful as an artist, just as I feel that I have never been anywhere near successful as a writer, but even when Anders can’t think of what to paint, he looks out the window, sees that the moon is often still visible in the morning and paints it over and over again. I know what that feels like: to have stories and words rolling around inside yourself but not quite knowing how to get them out.
In “Moon in the Morning,” Anders survives a shooting in the paint supply store where he’s browsing the aisles, and then goes home, bandaged and smelling like the hospital where he was taken to be treated. His cat seems wary of him at first because he doesn’t seem like the person who left home that day, but when the cat finally realizes it is Anders, the person he loves, he brings him a leaf—something the cat does from time to time, bring Anders some trinket. Is it a token of affection? Something the cat thinks is helping him to pay his way for the kindness Anders shows him? There’s also a mystery here: how did this leaf get into the apartment? The widows are closed, the cat is never let outside, so where did he find it? It really doesn’t matter, though, does it? All it means is that some living creature is showing another that a bond exists between them no matter what happens. It’s hardly enough to make up for all Anders has lost in his life, and what he has not achieved, but it’s something. It’s something.
“Old Friends” by Simon and Garfunkel
There’s a line in this song, “How terribly strange to be seventy,” that could actually relate to any story in the King the Wonder Dog collection, but I think it particularly resonates with “The Alcoholic Mariannes.” In this story, the main character, Laura, a retired seventy-one-year-old who once made her living as a house cleaner, happens upon a pet adoption van and decides to wander inside. Most of the cages hold puppies, but in the back, there’s one older dog, “a skinny brown mutt,” with his head down, staring at the floor of his cage. He looks scared and defeated, and like he knows that his life will always be this way. Laura had no intention of adopting a dog, but how can she turn away from this poor fellow? However, after she fills out the paperwork to adopt the dog, she’s told she can’t have him because the rescue group has a rule that people over seventy can’t have one of their dogs. Their reasoning is that there’s no telling what might happen to the dog if the older person dies or becomes too ill to care for their pet anymore. Laura is incensed by this edict, which is sort of condemning both her and the dog for their age and their condition of being alone in the world. It’s not in her nature to make trouble, but she can’t just leave the dog by himself, so she enlists the help of her local councilman to convince the woman who runs the rescue group to let Laura have the dog. She is finally able to take him home, but as she’s leaving the rescue group’s office with the dog, she’s told that he can’t bark, as if that’s a way of letting Laura know that she’s getting “a damaged product.” Laura takes the dog back to her apartment but for days, he remains in one spot right near the front door, still with his head down, not interacting with Laura except when she takes him out for a walk. But one night, Laura wakes to hear him barking—which, apparently, he can do—and when she walks out to her hallway, she sees the dog up on his feet, barking at the door, as if he’s heard some danger outside. Laura sits down and wraps her arms around him to comfort him, and finally he leans against her, as if he’s learning to accept love and attachment. Yes, it’s very strange to be seventy—and go one traveling beyond that milestone—but you have no choice. However, you can, maybe, find some comfort on that frightening journey, even if it’s just by putting your arms around a lonely dog.
“Bob Dylan’s Dream” by Bob Dylan
If you ever want to hear a really heartbreaking song about growing old and missing old friends, take a listen to “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” from his iconic 1963 album, The Freewheeling’ Bob Dylan. He was only twenty-two when that song was recorded, but I guess he must have had a premotion about what was coming because in the song he writes about being young and hanging out with his friends who he misses in his old age along with all the fun they had, so now he’d give, “Ten-thousand dollars at the drop of a hat” if once again “our lives could be like that.” In my story, “Thieves in Disguise,” two middle-aged women, are talking on the phone about their younger days and a plan they had to go to Montreal to see the places that Leonard Cohen mentions in his poems and songs. (Obviously, Cohen turns up in a lot of things I write.) Jenna and Kathy are old friends who spent their younger days in New York City, but Kathy lives in California now, so their only contact is during these phone calls. One night, they fantasize about how they might still go on that trip, but they’ll have to save up some money to buy a few things, like a slouchy hat, a beautiful pair of leather boots, and some sunglasses they can wear at night so they’ll look like “thieves in disguise.” Jenna has one other friend, her dog Slim Shady, who was once a puppy found wandering the streets. Sometimes, much like in my story “Old Friends,” referenced above, Jenna worries about what might happen to Slim Shady if something happens to her and she can’t take care of him anymore. So, she asks her brother, who lives far away from her, if he would take her dog if she can’t care for him anymore. Jenna and her brother had a childhood marked by anger and violence from the adults around them, but it was Jenna who took the brunt of the damage in order to protect her brother. So, when she asked about Slim Shady, her brother tells her, Get all the dogs you want. If I’m the one who’s still around, I’ll come get them. I owe you that much. Maybe more.
“Shenandoah,” traditional American folk song of uncertain original, dating to the early 19th century
In my story “Out of Season,” a gay man named Neil, who’s somewhere in his seventies, is spending the last day of his vacation in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, where he has spent many summers over the course of his long life. It’s also the end of the summer season in Provincetown, and as Neil wanders through town, he sees that the storekeepers are beginning to close up shop, putting away the kites and beach towels and all the other paraphernalia of a long, happy summer. Neil stops in the only bar that will stay open through the winter and comes upon a group of friends—older men—who live in Provincetown all year. They invite him into their conversation about how each of them acquired a cat because, as one says, every gay man has a cat. After this encounter, he decides to take a walk on the beach in a neighboring town where the painter Edward Hopper had a cottage and where he lived, and worked, for many summers. There, Neil has memories of a long-lost love who has never really left his thoughts. Finally, the next morning, as he’s driving away from Provincetown, heading home, he fantasizes about a day when he might come back here to live for good, when he’d “…pack up his apartment, and take a last walk through the empty rooms. Goodbye, goodbye, he’d say to the bare walls and the long years of life he’d be leaving behind.”
There is a sad, nostalgic element of this story that brings to my mind the folksong, “Shenandoah.” I first learned the words to this song in school, in a music class I had to take in junior high. They made us sing all kinds of folk songs, mixed in with—who knows why?—college football fight songs. But “Shenandoah” is the only song that’s really stayed with me and remains in a very vivid way, often replaying in my mind. It’s a song about a fur trader on the Missouri River who loves the daughter of a Native American chief, Shenandoah, and the refrain in the song is, “Away, I’m bound away, across the wide Missouri.” You know the man will never get back and the lovers will never be reunited. For me, that song and the feeling it engenders haunts the last day of Neil’s vacation and follows him as he drives away from Provincetown with memories of his own lost love in mind. He first came to Provincetown when he was young, but he’s so much older now. Will he get back to Provincetown next year, or ever? Who knows?
“Angel from Montgomery” written by John Prine, sung by Bonnie Raitt
In the story “Summer in the Mountains,” which is set in Woodstock, David Graeber has come to visit his cousin Joe, who, some time ago and seemingly out of the blue, announced to his wife that he was leaving because he was tired of talking about nothing all the time—blabbing on and on with her and his friends about everyday things that he no longer cares about or wishes to discuss. So, he moved up to the Catskills, to a cabin on the edge of a forest preserve, where he lives alone with his two big dogs. When David drives from town to Joe’s cabin, the two cousins enjoy their time together, reminiscing about things they used to do. For instance, David played in a band, but in the back of his mind, as he talks to Joe, is the recent doubt he has about why he’s still doing this, playing the top ten songs from some old hippie era over and over again. When he was young, the band meant everything to him but now, he has his doubts. They also discuss the growing anti-Semitism they sense all around them, and how they even experienced it when they were kids. At the end of the story, David drives back to his hotel in Woodstock and sits on the sort of lop-sided balcony outside his room. He thinks about how, “Looking out into the night, [he] is aware of the symbolism set out before him: there is a quiet street, a lonely road, a shaky perch where he sits and waits, and not far away, there is a light burning in the darkness. But what he is waiting for, he could not say. And what everything else taken together might mean for him remains, at least for now, unknown.”
The song that comes to me, playing in the background of this story, is Bonnie Raitt’s version of “Angel in Montgomery.” These lines, in particular, describe the mood that I hope I instilled in the pages of this story: “Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery / Make me a poster of an old rodeo / Just give me one thing that I can hold on to/ To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”
“Midnight in Harlem” by Tedeschi Trucks Band
In the title story of this collection, “King the Wonder Dog,” New York City is pulsing in the background of every line. The main character, Paul, is a graphic designer who lives in Brooklyn, has a studio on the edge of Chinatown in Manhattan, and walks across the Brooklyn Bridge almost every day with his big German shepherd named King. The sky and the weather are also referred to repeatedly, as in this description as Paul leaves his studio one night to head back across the bridge to his apartment: “Stars are beginning to appear in the sky, scattered like pins. Drifting clouds look like blue mountains; the moon is a thin crust of light rising in the east.”
Paul’s wife, Cassandra, is in the psychiatric unit of a hospital on the upper East Side of Manhattan, and the story opens with Cassandra calling Paul and telling him how much she wants him to take her home, which he soon does. But back at their apartment, Cassandra becomes agitated because she thinks she can’t find a pair of gold cuff bracelets that Paul has always called her “Wonder Woman” bracelets.” Cassandra calms down when Paul finds them in her jewelry box, but the next day she is upset again when Paul tells her he has to go back to his studio, where’s he’s trying to wrap up one last freelance design job, after which he is going to retire from that kind of work. Cassandra tells Paul she wants to go to the studio with him so he says he’ll call an Uber, but she says that she wants to walk across the bridge with him, like he always does, with his “damn dog.” As the three of them head across the bridge, the sunny weather suddenly turns dark and threatening; Cassandra kneels down and crosses her arms, as if she’s using her Wonder Woman bracelets to ward off some looming threat. Paul tries to pull her to her feet but she strikes him; he’s not hurt, just startled. The next thing he knows, his dog, who has always been calm and never exhibited any kind of menacing behavior, is suddenly positioned between Paul and Cassandra, as if he’s trying to protect Paul from any further harm. Everything soon continues on as if nothing ever happened and Paul, his wife and dog, walk on across the bridge to his studio, where he thinks about what he will do when he finishes the last project he’s working on. He’s always wanted to try writing a graphic novel and suddenly, is struck with inspiration: he’ll write a story about a heroic dog and his owner, and call it “King the Wonder Dog.”
The song “Midnight in Harlem” could be playing on a radio in the loft and in Paul’s apartment because these lyrics, in particular, sum up Paul’s longing for his life to be better, but also to maybe realize a dream he’s had of using his talent to do something different, to write that graphic novel and take inspiration from his dog, yes, but also from the city that is so much a part of his life, night and day: “The streets are windy / And the subway’s closing down / Gona carry this dream / To the other side of town / Walk that line / (Torn apart) Torn apart / Gotta spend your whole life trying / (Ride that train) Ride that train / (Free your heart) And free your heart / It’s midnight up in Harlem”
“Mothers and Daughters” by Maddie Zahm
My mother died when I was just on the cusp of adolescence. My father, who had no idea how to care for my brother and me, let alone himself, quickly remarried, to a woman who brought chaos and craziness into our lives. She and my father also managed to erase most memories of my mother because her pictures were put away and we understood that we should not talk about her. But, some flashes of memory remain. Most important is the last gift she gave me, a small, gray, manual typewriter, so I guess she had some idea of who I was going to grow up to be.
The story “Elder Care” is probably as close as I have ever come to writing, in a literal fashion, about my memories of my early life in the Bronx, and later, about being the caretaker for my father when he was elderly and ill and living in a nursing home in Rockaway, which at that time was just a desolate peninsula attached to a distant area of the New York City borough of Queens. Rockaway is also where my father and stepmother moved us after they married, not long after my mother died. It was bleak, lonely, and sure to lead to depression. (Lately, it’s been gentrified and recast as a summer playground for surfers and well-heeled millennials who can also afford the expensive condos being built by the seashore, but that was years away from when I lived there as an angry, disaffected teenager.) The story starts with Carole, my surrogate, visiting her father in his nursing home and spending a few prickly hours with him. It then shifts to the Bronx, where Carole grew up; she retraces my own steps down a familiar avenue to a toy store I loved, where she runs into someone her own age (Carole is probably in her sixties), who remembers her as a child and remembers her mother. The woman tells Carole that she was jealous of her when they were young because of how often her mother brought her to the toy store to buy little bits and pieces, like a little doll in a white box. To Carole, this is an incredibly important clue about the mother she barely remembers—she sounds like a kind and loving woman, and Carole finally understands how much she misses her. Once she finally gets home, Carole opens her dresser drawer where she keeps hidden the tiny doll that her mother bought her in the toy store, long ago, after her stepmother threw out all her other toys and mementos of her mother. (This is me again; that’s what my stepmother did and I do have the one tiny doll that survived.) Somehow, Carole thought the doll might be gone. But satisfied that it’s safe, she goes to bed and her dog jumps up on the bed to sleep with her; when he does, Carole reflects on her life and all the difficulties she’s had but now she’s safe, so is her dog who was once a stray puppy, lost and alone. And she thinks about how glad she is to have the dog with her. “Always, come what may.”
In real life (or, what passes for it, anyway), I do have photos of my mother that survived my stepmother’s wrath, so I know that I look very much like her. And though my memory has been stripped of most of the good things we must have shared, and because my father and stepmother had me so convinced that I must have been a terrible child who was often mean to my mother, the fact that I do still have the little doll, the typewriter, and one or two images of a few sweet moments here and there, like when we shared a lunch, with spring breezes coming through the kitchen window, is very important. I have thought of all this time and again, in particular when I first heard Maddie Zahm’s song, “Mothers and Daughters.” These lines are like a message to me, sent from the past to remind me that if I ever see my mom again in the great by and by, we’ll be alright: “I’m slowly becoming my mother / We’re even beginning to look like each other / From screaming, ‘I hate you,’ and, ‘You’re ruining my life’ / To panic attacks about the day that she dies.”
“Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” by Arlo Guthrie
If you’re a member of my generation—let’s call us the Woodstock Generation—the Vietnam War dominated your life twenty-four hours a day. I was born in 1952, and from the time I became politically aware, around the age of fourteen, nothing was more important than trying to end not only that pointless, murderous conflict but also the draft that was stealing all the young men around us, dressing them in an army uniform, and telling them to kill gooks (meaning, the Viet Cong, our “enemy” and any villagers who you might suspect of aiding them). One of the most absurd aspects of the war—in a kind of gothic horror way—was how the draft was conducted. It was a lottery—a lottery for your life!—that started in 1969 and randomly assigned draft priority numbers to all 366 possible birthdates for men aged 18–26, and then pulled those numbers from capsules in a rotating drum. My younger brother was born in 1956, which made him eligible for the draft when he was 18, and which kept us both permanently terrified. Now remember, this was a time when there was no Internet, no smartphones, no way to find out what number you were assigned if you didn’t watch the live drawing on tv (yes, this sounds like a dystopian novel, but it was real life) other than to find it in the newspaper or go to the library to look it up. The whole process was torture.
Arlo Guthrie managed to turn the draft process into the quintessential anthem of the anti-war movement. In the song “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” which goes on for over eighteen minutes, Arlo (for people my age, he will never need a last name) tells the story of going to Stockbridge, Massachusetts to have Thanksgiving dinner with his friends Alice and Ray Brock, who lived in a deconsecrated church. Arlo helped them clean out the place and was then arrested for illegally dumping trash, an offense that later, when he was being processed by the draft board in New York City, made him ineligible for the draft. One of the most famous lines in the song is about being asked if he’s rehabilitated himself after his arrest and he answers, “I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough join the army, burn women,
kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.”
In the story, “John and Pablo Meet Their Neighbors,” John is undergoing chemo treatment. One day, a nurse tells him that they’re moving the chemo suite “…across the hall to room 112,” and John spontaneously blurts out that 112 was his draft number. He then has to explain to the puzzled nurse about the Viet Nam war lottery. And he reminds himself that he thought the number 112 had stopped haunting him years ago, but apparently, it has not. John’s number never came up in the draft, but he became an ardent peace activist, fighting for a world where peace would prevail and everyone would be safe and happy. Look how that turned out, he tells himself. Later, he is pulled into an altercation with his neighbor when Pablo, his big, clumsy dog, accidentally falls against the fence that separates the two yards and destroys a small section. The neighbor, a large, threatening man, does not accept John’s apology about the dog’s accident and his promise to have the fence repaired; as he’s making threatening remarks, John, who is sick from the chemo, suddenly vomits on the grass and the neighbor calls him a hippie and junkie and says people like him don’t belong in the neighborhood. A few days later, after the fence is repaired, John finds himself thinking of who he was as a young man, “tall and lean,” working in a cornfield on a commune with a dog, “a big happy fellow” at his side. “And now, fast forward many years to find a man, decades older, relaxing in a rusty lounge chair [in his back yard] with a dog generations removed from the old friend who was with him in the cornfield. Maybe the young man was foolish in some ways…but he did manage to survive his trials and travails. And maybe the old man will survive his too, or maybe he won’t. That’s the way it always goes, right? Maybe yes and maybe no. And after that—well, after that, who can tell? Come what may.”
Every Thanksgiving, I still play “Alice’s Restaurant” in my house, and I think about all the other old hippies, like me, who are also playing it and thinking about how sad—and astonished—we are about the way the world is today. But we’re still here, and we’re still trying to make it better. Thanks, Arlo.
“Hurt,” Sung by Johnny Case, written by John Treznor of Nine Inch Nails
June Carter Cash died in May, 2003; her husband, Johnny Cash, died just four months later. He’d had all kinds of health problems and hadn’t looked well for a long time, but everyone who loved him and his music, knew that he had died of a broken heart. The love story between these two is one of those things that embody the best and the worst of love—the deep, true companionship; the lost-each-other-and-didn’t-get-back-together-for-years drama; the anger and fights; the holding hands to the very end duet. In 2002, when Johnny Cash released his version of Nine Inch Nails’ song, “Hurt,” I’m sure for most people of a certain age, it was like a knife in the gut. It’s not so much the specific lyrics, which are heart-rendering enough, but how you can tell, as Cash sings the song in his raw, lived-in, beaten and battered voice, that he knows—deep, down in his soul he knows—endless, incurable, elemental pain. When the video of Cash singing “Hurt” was released, Reznor said it gave him goosebumps. Reznor’s song is about a young man who knows the damage he’s done to his life—Cash’s version is about a man at the end of a long life, looking back and realizing how much of his life was dross.
In the story, “Lucky,” Jeanne, a retired text book editor, is beginning to feel something close to that. She been ill for a long time and as a consequence, one of the things she hasn’t done in a quite a while is to visit Macy’s, the huge department store on Herald Square in Manhattan. On the day she finally decides to travel to Manhattan from her apartment in Queens in order to buy something for herself, she is lost the minute she walks through the front doors. The layout is different than she remembers; she can’t find the handbag department; and even if she does locate the dress department, she knows everything will be styled too young to be of use to her. It’s a little scary and very depressing. She goes home empty-handed, only to find that her dog has not been returned to her apartment by Mona Giddings, the woman who works as her dogwalker. When she can’t get Giddings to answer her repeated calls, Mona goes to her apartment and finds that she has no intention of returning the dog because her daughter wants to keep him. Jeanne calls the police but when a policewoman first arrives, she refuses to get involved but eventually she does, and despite Mona and her daughter try to make it seem as if Jeanne is neglecting the dog, Jeanne gets him back and exhausted, walks him home.
Throughout this story, the fact that Jeanne has been ill for a long time and also, is undeniably getting older, is meant to help define how lost she’s feeling in this part of her life. The extra burden of having to get her dog back from the child of her dogwalker adds to how difficult it feels for her to just get through the days. I think that’s the kind of unrelenting ache that Cash shares with us when he sings this song. You just know he’s nearing the end and doesn’t feel that he understands what the purpose of his life has been, or what his life was worth. And you sometimes have that feeling, too. I certainly do.
Eleanor Lerman is the author of award-winning collections of poetry, short stories, and novels. One of the youngest-ever finalists for a National Book Award, she also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the NEA for poetry and the New York Foundation for the Arts for fiction. During a career that has spanned over fifty years, her poetry, fiction, and essays have been published in dozens of literary magazines and journals. Find her online at eleanorlerman.com and on Facebook (facebook.com/eleanor.lerman).