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For fans of Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, a polyphonic debut following an aging French bulldog and the parasitic worms that send her toward death — a singular, sly novel about form, freedom, interiors, and the matter by which we are composed and consumed.
Gelsomina is an elderly French bulldog who lives in a glass house in the mountains. Paned by transparency, she’s lived in imitations—of the man and the woman, of the younger dog, Zampanò, of the wild unknown beyond the windows.
One day, Gelsomina accidentally ingests an orb of parasitic worms. Approaching death, and filled with new life, she begins to see everything differently. She makes changes in the pattern of her days, and the glass house fractures into many voices. The worms burrowing into Gelsomina regard her body as an imperfect structure, the home they inherited but did not dream of. The couple—Wendy, in interiors, and John, in architectural design—face the claws of human attachment, and what our will to domesticate means for the life of an animal who can see the wild, but never know it.
Day’s architectural instincts breath into Gelsomina’s new and panting life meditations on animal suicide, string theory, philosophical approaches to form, and the question of whether a glass house can ever be a home. The Oldest Bitch Alive tails Gelsomina into one final, ecstatic sprint through the invisible fence and into a wilderness she’s never seen—activating the depths of attachment, reverence, death, and the bounded self in dichromatic color.
Book Details
Format:
Hardcover
Price:
28 USD / 37.99 CAD
Published: 03/24/2026
ISBN: 9781662603372
Imprint:
Astra House
Page Count: 220
Trim Size: 5-1/2 x 8-1/4
“The Oldest Bitch Alive is an iridescent reminder of literature’s unique power. Morgan Day’s genius unfurls across each page, microcosm by microcosm, discovering immense depth in the gut of this small dog. Sensational, unnerving, and true.”
—Henry Hoke, author of Open Throat
“Days after I’d finished reading The Oldest Bitch Alive, phrases and images from the novel were still sounding in my head. It is entirely and utterly unique, meditative, philosophical, and entertaining—it wraps you in pulsing rhythms of strange, elliptical prose, yet ultimately deposits you on entirely solid ground. A masterpiece!”
—Albertine Clarke, author of The Body Builders
“New writing I immediately love comes along only every few years. Morgan Day's The Oldest Bitch Alive is my find of the year: philosophically expansive, linguistically dexterous, formally adventurous, surprising, moving and very funny.”
—Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo and My Life as a Godard Movie
“Weirdly immersive and irresistible, written in exquisite, palpable prose, The Oldest Bitch Alive is a stunning, speculative achievement. The novel plunges us into a place where worms are wise, dogs desire, and humans overlook the multispecies worlds they inhabit. Rich with biological marvels, philosophical ruminations, and poetic revelations, this novel lures the reader into a vivid sense of what it means to exist as a being enmeshed in relations with other beings, the material world, and the cosmos, ‘vermillion margins extending into vermillion margins.’ I will be reflecting on this mesmerizing novel for a very long time!”
—Stacy Alaimo, author of The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep Sea Life