Barking at Dogs, a Controversial, Genuinely Funny Book That Sits Astride Apartheid's Fault Lines

Barking at Dogs is a controversial collection of short stories confronting apartheid's racial, cultural, and religious fault lines. Out 30 Sept 2026. deiora.com

SAN DIEGO, CA, UNITED STATES, September 14, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Studio Deiora, an independent publishing imprint based in San Diego, will release Barking at Dogs by Leon Lazarus on 30 September 2026. The book is a controversial collection of linked short stories, genuinely funny and often at its own narrator's expense, while sitting squarely inside the discomfort of a country built on division.

Lazarus grew up white on the edge of suburbia in late-apartheid South Africa, inside several fault lines at once. He benefited, without asking to, from the line the apartheid laws drew between white and black South Africans, and the Introduction opens with him reckoning directly with that. He grew up caught between English and Afrikaans South Africa, two white communities sharing a country and barely sharing a language. Being Jewish in a country where Christianity was the underpinning of oppression and revolution put him just inside the system's protection and just outside its sense of who truly belonged.

Barking at Dogs does not resolve these tensions for the reader. It sits inside them, story by story, letting the absurdity and the cruelty of the system show through without turning anyone, including its own narrator, into a hero.

“I did not set out to write a book about apartheid specifically,” said Lazarus. “I set out to write stories that reflect my lived experience. That includes a haunted hotel, a pickup truck full of lion dung, and many more absurdities. It turned out I could not tell those stories without talking frankly about the country they happened in.”

One story, Warmbaths, follows his family on an unannounced road trip into the Afrikaner heartland, where snotty, urbanite, white South Africa bumped into fatherland and fried bread. Another, Lost in Rhini, turns a simple drive to a black friend's home into a gauntlet of soldiers, police, and checkpoints, each one a reminder of exactly whose country this was meant to be. Later stories carry that same unease into the dangerous years right after apartheid ended.

Studio Deiora is publishing the book because these are not comfortable stories, and Lazarus was not interested in making them comfortable.

Barking at Dogs will be available in paperback (ISBN 979-8-89412-654-8, list price $18.99) from 30 September 2026, with worldwide distribution. The book can be found through online booksellers in North America, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the EU, and South Africa. The publication date falls just days after Heritage Day, the South African holiday built around the kind of cultural collision the book keeps returning to.

Readers, booksellers, and reviewers can find excerpts, a press kit, and ordering information at deiora.com.

Leora Lazarus
Studio Deiora
leora@deiora.com