Dogged Pursuit

Read Robert Rodi's posts on the Penguin Blog. "A charming, hilarious look at a little-documented world." -- People In dog years, Robert Rodi is 350. Age, however, couldn't possibly have prepared him for his experience with canine agility-the athletic cousin to best-of-breed shows. Rodi, an epicure and urban intellectual, picks up agility with aspirations for blue ribbons. His dreams of glory quickly fade when faced with the competition: hearty Midwestern handlers and their ferociously fit pups, who annihilate scrawny, scruffy, Dusty, Rodi's rescue dog and would-be champ, in the ring. The duo is utterly lost in the agility circles, but as in the best human/pet stories, they forge an everlasting bond to carry them through. Combining the wit of Christopher Guest's Best in Show and the charm of Marley & Me, Dogged Pursuit is an uproarious account of a neophyte's year in the dog show world that abounds in humor and warmth.

Follows the tenants of Japan's nuttiest apartment house where Kyoko, the manager, Yusaku, the college student, Mrs. Ichinose, the drunken gossip, Akemi, the boozy bar hostess, and Mr. Yostuya, the mooching peeper, reside.

An irreverent selection of essays by the best-selling author of Wry Martinis traces his literary friendships, family experiences and travels in such entries as "How to Teach Your Four-Year-Old to Ski," "A Short History of the Bug Zapper" and "The Art of Sacking."

This is the first volume of a 2-part series, a bio-historical fiction, centred in Madras and covering a period of 4 decades from the late 1920s. Raju, the main protagonist, was born a posthumous child. After losing his other parent at the age of 15 and tossed from one school to another and later from one job to another, he finally finds his home in the historic, but rapidly modernising city of Madras. Disgusted with the Endowment Department’s collusion with an artefact thief in his first job as a Temple Inspector, he shifts to a job as a Tea Salesman in a multinational company in Madras. The artefact thief happens to be Sankar, his childhood nemesis. Gaining insight from his earlier encounters with Sankar, Raju’s keen mind takes him into the dangerous realm of international antique and gold smugglers. His first mentor, Natarajan, guides him in his risky endeavours to put Sankar behind bars. It will take a lot of innovation and tenacity for Raju to make a breakthrough in the investigations. While one part of him is a daring investigator, the other part is a loving husband and father, a hard working employee and a caring friend to his other childhood friends, the communist-minded Sekar and the fickle Ganesan. The main storyline has two parallel narratives. The first is related to the growth of Madras and the other with the behind-the-scenes twists and turns in Tamilnadu