The Shaggy Dog & Other Stories

About the Book

Here is John Pascal once again, with a new book of entertaining fiction—a collection of sixteen “Shaggy Dog” stories and four more traditional tales, one a novelette. Saki (H.H. Munro) and O. Henry (William Sidney Porter) wrote short stories with surprise endings, but mainly satirical, not comedic. As Pascal tells us in his Preface to them: “All Shaggy Dog tales are comedies, high or low, depending upon their subject matter and the writer’s art. Briefly, getting to the conclusion of a good Shaggy Dog story can be well worth the wait; and in a truly great one there can be a lot of fun along the way.” And he would agree that since traditionally these anecdotes have been related orally (at a Club, bar, or other private or limited venues), they have not been given the attention they deserve nor the entertainment they would provide to a larger audience.

About the Author

Following twenty years as a U.S. Army officer Pascal R. Politano lectured in English and political science at the university level, intermittently over a period of eight years, in both Germany and Italy. He has traveled widely in Europe and Africa as well as in South and Central America and in the Far East. He has published two books of poetry, The Man in the Moon and Other Poems and Painting the Lily and Other Poems, as well as several novels, several collections of short stories, a book of memoirs, and one of essays, using the pen names John Pascal and Atticus Grammaticus. Currently, he is working on compiling a nonfictional book of socio-political essays entitled A Sharp Seasoning of Truth. He lives in semi-seclusion in Upstate New York.