Sit!: Ancestral Dog Portraits

Originally published in 1993, Sit! was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and was excerpted in Harper's magazine and The New York Times Book Review. George Booth, writing in the NYTBR, called it "the best of humor....Delightful!" while Cosmopolitan pronounced it "irresistible."

Renamed Remembrance of Dogs Past, this fetching collection of 70 disarmingly funny portraits is as fresh and funny as ever. Beginning with an 18th- or 19th-century ancestral portrait, Thierry Poncelet seamlessly paints in a dog's head over the original human subject's. The resulting tour de force is a fantasy that looks uncannily real, the dogs appearing all too human in their military regalia or elaborate gowns. And for a glorious twist, New Yorker humorist Bruce McCall names each dog and offers a brilliant tongue-in-cheek biographical sketch. Thus there's Lord Gristle (black Labrador), proprietor of a vast tabloid chain, with dark memories of rolled-up newspapers; Marie-Claire DuBossy (white poodle), who shocked France's poetry circles by refusing to beg; and Percival Horace Denbeigh (Jack Russell terrier), Britain's foremost military correspondent, with an infallible nose for news.

It's a howl.