B.T. Frug is a 120-year-old dog and first-time author. He recounts his many life experiences in his new book, American Dog: 117 Years of Humping Around America, Including a Marvelous Journey with Johnny O’Shea, Jr.
San Antonio, TX – USA, February 28, 2020 — B.T. Frug is a 120-year-old dog and first-time author. He recounts his many life experiences (and those of his former owners) in his new book, American Dog: 117 Years of Humping Around America, Including a Marvelous Journey with Johnny O’Shea, Jr. The book is part memoir and part travelogue, according to Frug’s former owner/travel companion and fellow author, Johnny O’Shea, Jr., who is coordinating the book’s publication. It is, perhaps, something like a roman à clef: The road trip it details is definitely nonfiction and the veracity of the rest is a mystery.
Frug—who prefers “Bandit,” his favorite name among the many he’s had over the past century—identifies as a French bulldog-pug mix and wandering mendicant. He declares early in American Dog that he’s something of an equal-opportunity hater when it comes to any kind of group and the groupthink that inevitably comes along with it. However, his begrudging affection for just about every individual he encounters shines through.
Frug is not sure why or how, but he stopped aging around three or four years old—his early twenties, in dog years—and has been itinerate ever since, avoiding suspicion by never staying with an owner or in a home for more than ten years. This supernatural amount of time has allowed Frug to pick up skills such as typing and communicating in the English language. They are skills that Frug insists all dogs are inherently capable of but do not have sufficiently long lives to master.
O’Shea, whose 2016 cross-country road trip with Frug—during which they distributed O’Shea’s own book, Back in Bloom: Rediscovering the Happiness Inside of You—is detailed in American Dog, says that Frug’s current whereabouts are unknown and that he has not heard from his old companion in several years. The two authors and former creative collaborators do not seem to identify as friends.
Frug’s manuscript is cobbled together largely from nightly journal entries typed while on the road with O’Shea. Through O’Shea, he cites John Steinbeck’s 1962 Travels with Charley: In Search of America, Anthony de Mello, and “Hemingway, Lincoln, Roosevelt (Teddy, obviously)” as influences.
Frug and O’Shea’s road trip across the Lower 48 happened over the course of Fall 2016—a crucial, charged time for America. American Dog documents the motels they stay in, the hitchhikers they pick up, the booze they share, and the unlikely relationship that develops between dog and man.
Frug’s observations are sometimes stunning, often bitingly funny, and always from a twisted, terribly clear-eyed perspective you’ve never before considered.
The author’s motives for wanting to publish the book now are not fully known, but O’Shea imagines that it might have a little something to do with mortality and sharing his unique insights while he can. Frug can die, after all, just not from old age.
Author Name on Cover: B.T. FRUG
ISBN Paperback: 9781612448169
Paperback Price: $18.95
eBook Price: $6.95
Page Count: 308
Available Worldwide
Press & Media Contact:
Lisa Michelle Umina, Publisher
Halo Publishing International, Inc
8000 W Interstate 10, Suite 600,
San Antonio, TX 78230 – USA
+1 216-255-6756