Publisher's Synopsis
Magnetic Dogs is a collection of short stories that examines how displaced individuals - those who have been snatched out of their time and place - struggle to adapt and reinvent themselves in an entirely new context or re-establish themselves in their former situations. In stories that are factual fiction, Meyer examines the composition of Gabriel Fauré's haunting "Cantique de Jean Racine," the 1960s 'scoop' of Indigenous children from Manitoulin Island, the missing diaries of Lewis Carroll that save that author from the charges of child molestation that ruined his career as an academic, the true story of a shade of red and Seventh Century Chinese exploration of the North Atlantic, and the origins and ramifications of a haunting Aztec form of music, borrowed by J.S. Bach, the 'chaconne.' In these stories Meyer constantly questions the ways our perceptions of the past might have been different had small events transpired to make them so.