Coffee with a canine: Erin McGraw & Max and Sister

Today's featured trio at Coffee with a Canine: Erin McGraw & Max and Sister.

The author, on how her dogs help and hinder her writing:

I don't find many things more comforting than the soft breathing of comfortable dogs beside me while I work. I'm also crazy about the smell of clean dogs in the sun. Sister, who's very catlike, follows the sun all day as it moves across the windows, and I frequently bury my nose in her warm fur.

But dogs know how to tell time--any dog owner knows this--and when it's nine o'clock Sister and Max don't give a rip whether my work is going well: They want their walk. Same deal at three o'clock. Is it my imagination, or is work always going at its best at 9 in the morning and...[read on]

About McGraw's new novel, Better Food for a Better World, from the publisher:

Better Food for a Better World by Erin McGraw is a wrenching satire exploring the boundaries of fidelity and commitment, friendship and business. It is the story of the often-disastrous path taken by those striving to do good in the world. Three couples, college friends who reunite in middle age, pool their money, energy, and hipster idealism to start an ice cream store-Natural High Ice Cream: Better Food for a Better World. The store finds a ready clientele in its bucolic, marijuana-tinged northern California town filled with amiable ex-hippies who are happy to contribute to a better world, even if all they have to contribute is an ice cream cone. But the store is financially unsustainable and rifts start to appear between the friends, one of whom, without telling her partners, starts to rev up her old business as a booking agent for a crew of contortionists, jugglers, musicians, and dancers. She's going to save them all-and Natural High too, but this turns out to be harder than it appears, as she discovers she's not the only one with secrets. "Erin McGraw has a consistently winning stance in her wide-ranging stories-she is insightful, funny, deeply humane. I love the way her mind works," said Amy Hempel of McGraw's previous book, The Good Life.

Learn more about the book and author at Erin McGraw's website.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Erin McGraw & Max and Sister.

--Marshal Zeringue