Leap of the Dog

by Antonio J. Hopson

When Paradise quits his job and heads for Ireland, he brings along his longtime friend—and reluctant witness—for the ride. What begins as a trip through pubs, ferries, music, impossible roads, and the green landscape of Ireland gradually becomes something far more personal.

Traveling from Dublin and Doolin north toward Belfast and Limavady, the two American friends—one Black and cerebral, the other red-haired, restless, and Irish-American—begin to confront the things they thought they understood about race, ancestry, friendship, class, sectarian history, and belonging.

149 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 4, 2026

About the author

Antonio J. Hopson (AJ) is a Seattle writer and teacher, and the author of Leap of the Dog, Nefarious, Seven, and Ogden Messiah. His work includes novels, short stories, poetry, and audiobooks. Leap of the Dog follows two longtime American friends through Ireland and Northern Ireland as their journey opens questions about race, ancestry, friendship, and belonging.

Antonio (AJ) Hopson honed his skills writing speculative fiction, flash fiction and essays. His stories have been widely published: Quiet Shorts Magazine, Letter X, Creation, The Wonder Boy Review, Ascent, 20 Dissidents and Old Growth Journal, The Harrow Magazine, Monongahela Review, The Subterranean Quarterly, OutCry Magazine, Lost Magazine, The Angler, The Piker Press and also NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse Magazine. He has received Farmhouse Magazine's Reader's Choice award and performed as a featured author at Seattle's Richard Hugo House. As a performer and panelist, he has appeared at Seattle's Rainbow Bookfest. In 2008 he was selected to participate in Evergreen College's Literary Conference on "Activism and the Avant-Garde" and in 2009 he was an EPPIE Award Finalist. Please visit AntonioHopson.com to see what he is up to these days.

Reviews

[Fiza Pathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 STARS WOW. There is an old story in the north of Ireland, preserved in the very name of a town, about a dog that leaped a river The Irish is Leim an Mhadaidh, ‘the leap of the dog’, and over the centuries English-speaking mouths have worn it smooth into Limavady. Local tradition places the leap near O’Cahan’s Rock above the River Roe, if I remember correctly and if my eidetic memory serves me right this time at 5:10am (IST) in the morning, where a chieftain’s hound is said to have cleared the water to summon help after a surprise attack. Antonio J. Hopson takes this fragment of folklore and builds an entire moral architecture around it in his seminal book ‘Leap of the Dog’ which is a 2026 novella which I wish never ended because it was so intellectually delicious and gorgeous and is published by Wildboy Concepts Publishing in Seattle. I came to this novella expecting a lively travel narrative about two Americans drinking their way across Ireland, which is somewhat like my latest short which I am publishing in a while LOL. But I finished ‘Leap of the Dog’ convinced I had read a small, luminous meditation on courage, identity, belonging, and the strange humility that a land older than our arguments can teach us. It is one of the most satisfying novellas I have read this year 2026 a long while back and I award it 5 stars with real gladness and now I really respect and honor this author, Antonio J. Hopson. What a winner of a book!

The premise is deceptively simple actually. Two friends from Buffalo, now living in Seattle, travel to Ireland. One is the narrator, Tony, a writer whose father is a Black American descended from the slave diaspora and whose mother is Slavic. The other is his friend, a red-haired, red-bearded former bartender turned high school English teacher whom everyone calls Paradise. Paradise has come to collect on a childhood promise made to his Irish immigrant grandparents, whose late-night talk taught him the word ‘craic’ long before he understood what it meant. The two men move from Dublin to the far west of Clare, then north across the border toward Belfast and the town of the dog’s leap according to my Kindle notes, where a woman they met in a Dublin pub has invited them to visit. That is all the plot I intend to reveal, because Hopson’s achievement lies precisely in the way each encounter quietly rearranges everything that came before it. A reader deserves to make that journey without a GPS or Fiza Pathan map. Take the journey and buy this book – you will reinvent yourself for the better! Trust me on that one.

Any reader steeped in the literature of the road in fact like me, (though I actually personally abhor travelling) will feel the presence of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ behind this book, and I suspect Hopson intends the echo. Kerouac’s narrator, after all, was named Sal Paradise, - yes - and he spent the novel orbiting the electric, restless figure of Dean Moriarty. Though our Antonio Hopson performs an elegant inversion per se. Here the name Paradise you see -- belongs not to the observing narrator but to the magnetic friend, and it was given to him, we learn, by a weary stranger outside a Buffalo bar who told him he was always looking for paradise. The name is a diagnosis disguised as a nickname. Rich, Intellectually refined and yet lucid in prose and inspirational – lovely job there Antonio! Where Kerouac celebrates motion almost without reservation, ‘Leap of the Dog ‘asks what motion costs and what it cannot purchase. The book stands closer still to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’, in which my favorite Nick Carraway watches a charismatic man pursue a dream that the world will not ratify. Tony is a Carraway for our century you see ---- admiring, wary, implicated, and slowly coming to understand that his own habit of observation is not as innocent as he once believed. Fitzgerald would have approved of Tony. Fitzgerald to me was an American Demi-God and my favorite American novel or classic will forever remain ‘The Great Gatsby’. It still brings tears to my eyes, and the eyes of my senior tuition students. I think Antonio is in great company.

The novella is also, unmistakably, a love letter to Ireland written by someone who has listened carefully to how the Irish speak. You see, the dialogue sparkles. A black-bearded patron in Doolin furiously disputing which pub is the smallest in Ireland, a pair of teenage sisters bickering over a sandwich in a Dublin laundromat, a bus driver dispensing marital advice, a man recounting his frozen vigil for a bread truck on a winter road ----- lovely, exquisite and so mundane in its richness ----- these minor literary figures leap off the page with the vitality of characters in let us say John Millington Synge or in the early stories of Roddy Doyle indeed! Antonio J. Hopson (I better remember that J) has an excellent ear for the rhythm of Northern speech in particular, with its dropped consonants and rounded vowels, and he renders it without condescension. Steven Pinker would have approved too, especially I am thinking of his early work ‘The Language Instinct’ which was truly a par excellence work on psycholinguistics and I see clearly in these narrations that our Antonio is following the same rules – Antonio seems to be quite a scholar. The chapters also are seasoned like the excessive red meat right now in my fridge, with phrases in Irish Gaelic, often given with their English meaning, and these function almost like the antiphons of a liturgy to me per se. ‘Waiting without waiting’….oh la la…..'action with no movement’…..oh la la….and the title of that 2nd chapter you see could stand as an epigraph for the whole book. ‘Endurance was older than authority’….I could lick this sentence up like mango icecream….I digress….. the narrator reflects on the same, first in Irish and then in English, and it distills the historical memory of an entire island into a single line.

The section set in the west of Ireland is, for my money, among the finest writing I have encountered about traditional Irish music and the culture of the pub. Antonio J. Hopson (is the dot after the J or before – pardon I am sleep deprived!) understands that an Irish session is not a performance but a communion. He describes a room in which authority is granted only by participation, where an old man plays the bones and sings of a girl from County Clare while his wife watches him with a stillness that makes every word undeniable. He describes a figure called Mickey Flynn, hailed by a shy British visitor as the Elvis of Ireland, whose rock and roll has the sound, in Hopson’s phrase, of someone who had buried people and kept living anyway – ah – sooooo me. But I merely exist. And then, in one of the book’s most beautiful passages, he describes how the dead seemed to become locally available in that small room, as if song had lowered the distance between their world and ours. Readers who know the old Celtic idea of thin places, where the veil between the visible and invisible worlds grows slight, will recognize exactly what Hopson is evoking. I was personally as a senior English Literature teacher reminded of the last pages of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, where a certain Gabriel having heard a song from the west of Ireland, feels his own identity fading into a gray impalpable world and understands that the time has come for him to set out on his journey westward. Hopson’s travelers make that westward journey literally, and like Gabriel they feel the dead draw near in the west, though the narrator warns that it is farther north, in the songs, stories, and names of the North, that the dead truly refuse to stay dead. One also remembers in poetry, the poem ‘Haunted Houses’ of actually American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow where Wadsworth paints a sort of gentle and comforting picture of the past and that same essence of a bridge connecting the afterlife with this reality – making this bridge the meeting point of those gone by who still remember and comfort the living. The bridge depicts stories, feeling, memories and so much else that again Steven Pinker would say mean more about a place or time or country than mere linguistic words or mere language can decipher or fathom. It is a Universal Language every new born baby is born with says Steven Pinker and even Antonio – a language not of happiness nor sorrow – but of a haunting feeling of comfort, that one is near what one knows is one’s own and what one came from. Steven Pinker would have certainly applauded Antonio J. Hopson. Indeed he would and so also Wadsworth and anyone who has felt a lacerating pain at the loss of dear loved ones and a time gone by.

Joyce, in fact, is the presiding literary spirit of the book to me as a globally now recognized literary scholar and educationist, and our Antonio J. Hopson declares this from the start actually. The novella opens with an epigraph from the final pages of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, in which Stephen Dedalus welcomes life and resolves to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience. Later, in a pub in Clare, Tony recalls Joyce’s famous line, spoken by Stephen in ‘Ulysses’, that history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. Erudite, reflective and resonating with rich literary and philosophical quality – excellent stuff happening here!

At its heart, ‘Leap of the Dog’ is a novella about being seen, and about the terrible difference between being seen and being named. In one of the most powerful scenes in the book, which I will describe only in outline, Paradise meets the gaze of a stranger who has already decided who he is. For a man whose entire life has rested on his ability to read rooms and bend them toward him, this is a revelation that Antonio J. Hopson renders with devastating economy. Paradise, who believed identity was adjustable like a volume knob per se, discovers that this belief was a comforting luxury. The reader who knows Jean-Paul Sartre will think at once of his famous analysis of the look in ‘Being and Nothingness’ like my English Literature IBDP students, where the gaze of the ‘Other’ fixes ‘me’ (in this instance) as an object and reveals that I have an outside I cannot control. But the more profound echo is Frantz Fanon’s ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ which I read only recently in 2026 itself for my English Literature as well as Psychology tuition classes (IBDP) ---- now that was a dynamite of a book – and trust me to forget to clock it in……I digress…..that ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ Doctoral Dissertation of Fanon in which Fanon describes being fixed by a stranger’s exclamation and sealed into what he calls a crushing objecthood. What makes Hopson’s handling of this theme so original is that it is the white Irish-American, not the Black narrator, who undergoes this experience in Northern Ireland, and the narrator watches his friend learn in an afternoon what he himself has known all his life. The scene is never preachy. It is simply true, and it lands harder because Hopson trusts the reader to feel it.

The philosophical heart of the novella, however, lies in its title and its central image. The ‘leap’ is a word with a long and distinguished history in Western thought. Søren Kierkegaard (got that ø from Google obviously, my desktop computer keyboard is incapable of such variety in the letters of the alphabet LOL), in argued that the passage to faith cannot be accomplished by reasoning step by careful step. No. It requires a leap, a decisive commitment made without the certainty that reason would like to provide. Kierkegaard’s knight of faith acts without being able to justify his action in the universal language of ethics or logic. The dog in Hopson’s legend is such a knight in animal form. As Suzanne’s father puts it in the story told to her as a child, the dog did not have to think, because a dog does not have to consider how its legs are meant to move. Yet Hopson complicates the picture beautifully. The novella asks whether every leap is an act of faith, or whether some leaps are evasions, a refusal to stand still long enough to be known or to really know or to really know that one at last knows (recalling the Pharisees in the Gospel of John asking Jesus whether they were blind too, and he stating that if they were truly blind they would be free from guilt, but since they claimed that they indeed could see, then their guilt remained). Tony’s growing realization that his friend fears stillness more than rejection --- ah, the reality now of 95% of the global population of the world ----- (even while claiming to be doing Yoga, Meditation or Nikson – they are still not being still, but even then are more active and their thoughts are in utter chaos than when they are in motion) and Paradise’s own creed that you either move or you calcify, give the book a moral seriousness that never becomes heavy.

The theological resonances of the book run deeper still actually – and as you can see, I can’t get enough of them while typing this book review. The very name Paradise evokes the oldest human longing in the Western tradition, the memory of Eden and the hope of its recovery. Beyond that, the whole book can be read as a meditation on what Saint Augustine of Hippo meant when he wrote at the opening of his book ‘Confessions’ that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. (It is a different question that he later reiterated while living that only ‘truly celibate men’ were fit to have their hearts feel ‘restless for God’, but let us ignore that for now shall we) Paradise is the restless heart incarnate, a man who moves through the world as if paradise must exist just around the next corner. His friends call it charm. Saint Augustine would call it longing. The novella’s genius lies in showing, without any sermonizing, that the restless heart cannot find its rest by moving faster. It must at some point learn to sit still, to listen, and to receive.

Ireland, of course, has a unique religious history of wandering by the by – whether you look at it right now from the wandering novels perspective in English Literature or Wandering Desert Fathers or the wandering soul et al. The early Irish monks practiced what they called peregrinatio pro Christo, which is voluntary exile for the love of Christ. Saint Columba sailed to Iona, Saint Brendan was said to have crossed the Atlantic in search of the Promised Land of the Saints, and countless monks gave up their native ground as a form of white martyrdom. Early in the journey the travelers speak of heading west to Croagh Patrick, the holy mountain of Saint Patrick, where pilgrims still climb barefoot each summer. Our dear Antonio does not make his travelers into pilgrims in any conventional sense, and thank God he does not, but the shape of a pilgrimage is unmistakably evident from a departure, a series of trials and revelations, an encounter with the sacred in unexpected places, and a return to ordinary life changed in some essential way – all that is quite there and unmistakable to a student and teacher of Catholic Theology. T. S. Eliot captured this pattern in ‘Little Gidding’ (MYP IB tuition students globally, especially English Literature students of MYP 5 and MYP 4, hope you remember this one! It is the last one from ‘Four Quarters’) if you remember, where he wrote that the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. That line could stand as a gloss on the final movement of Hopson’s book. I recall thereby ‘The Alchemist’ by controversial Paulo Cohelo in the same instance, but obviously – a sane person will remember Eliot (esoteric master who did not know he was!) first and then Coelho. But sadly, I am aware that readers and non-readers (oh the latter are there now in plenty) alike only are familiar with the latter more than the former, but let us hope this changes soon – really soon, with more meaty and gutsy books like ‘Leap of the Dog’ becoming popular in the publishing market.

I must say something about the prose itself, which is one of the great pleasures of this book indeed! Antonio J. Hopson writes in short, rhythmic sentences that often stand alone as paragraphs, and his style has the compression and musicality of prose poetry. The ‘road west refused obedience’, he writes as I can remember now from memory rather than staring back and forth at my Kindle notes and the reader feels the Irish lanes twisting beneath the tires. Fields pass in long green sentences. A river moves with the steady force of something that had been correcting the land and men for centuries. The Atlantic breathes its slow animal breath. Guinness settles into the bloodstream like butter into bread etc-etc-etc. Paradise’s humor, as Tony observes, was how he tested the floorboards before putting his full weight down, and Hopson’s own humor serves the same purpose nice to see that Antonio and I are both humourists, hope that both of us are not using it as a defense mechanism, that is all. And if we are, I am glad we are not aware of it, because without such serene and simple humor, life right now would be more than just painful – it would be numbing. This is a very funny book in other words. Another reason why I loved it. A borrowed two-word phrase of local approval that the friends apply to everything from cliffs to sheep becomes a running joke of real comic genius, and the novella contains some of the most delightful pub conversation I have read since Flann O’Brien (okay – I’ll be honest, I’ve ONLY read and can remember Flann O’Brien’s pub conversations; if there are other books of the same nature, I am not aware of them. I tend to be conceited even in my humility). But the laughter is always in service of something deeper, and the book never loses its moral seriousness.

The structure of the novella deserves praise as well at this point. Our Antonio does not tell his story in strict chronological order. Memory folds back on itself, and the legend of the dog recurs at key moments like a musical motif as it were. This is not trauma at all evocating such ‘back and forth’ memories but ‘music’. English Literature IBDP students please note. This structure mirrors the book’s understanding of Ireland itself, a place where the past is never entirely past, where the road is not taking you somewhere new but returning you. At just over 149 pages, it can be read in a single evening, ideally with a pint (or if you don’t do alcohol like me, then coffee or tea/chai) at one’s elbow, yet it lingers in the mind long after the final page.

It is worth noting, too, how carefully our dear Antonio J. Hopson handles the friendship at the core of the book. Male friendship in fiction is often rendered either as sentimental camaraderie or as rivalry and now days turning into romance, but Hopson captures something more complex and more true. Tony and Paradise love each other, admire each other, irritate each other, and see each other with increasing clarity as the journey unfolds. Tony describes two gravities held in the same sky, and his own fear of having become a moon in his own life, borrowing light from someone else’s orbit. By the end of the book the friendship has been tested and transformed. Hopson’s conclusion about it is one of the wisest lines in the novella actually ---- that friendship is not built on agreement per se, but on recognition, and that men eventually see each other without lighting. I found this deeply moving, and more hopeful than the expatriate drinking of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’ these men end not in disillusion but in hard-won maturity.

‘Leap of the Dog’ belongs on the shelf beside Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’, Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’, Baldwin’s essays, and Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ and ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, books that are, in their different ways, about the search for belonging and the cost of the search. 5 Stars - WOW!

[Erin Strong · Rating 4.75 out of 5]

Antonio J. Hopson’s Leap of the Dog is a thoughtful, atmospheric novella about friendship, travel, identity, belonging, and the uncomfortable process of discovering that the person you thought you knew—and perhaps the person you thought you were—is more complicated than you imagined.

The story follows an unnamed narrator and his friend Paradise, two Americans traveling through Ireland. What begins as an adventurous journey filled with pubs, Guinness, music, women, humor, and the pleasures of the Irish landscape gradually becomes something much more serious. The trip takes the men from Dublin and the western coast toward Northern Ireland, where history, identity, race, religion, and political division force them to confront realities that cannot be dismissed with charm or clever conversation.

At the center of the book is the story of the dog that supposedly leapt across a river first, giving its human companion the courage—or necessity—to follow. The image becomes an effective metaphor for Paradise. He is a man who acts before thinking, who constantly moves toward the next experience, and who seems to believe that confidence and personality can open almost any door. The narrator, by contrast, is more cautious and analytical, constantly observing and interpreting what is happening around him.

Their friendship is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Paradise is charismatic, funny, impulsive, occasionally obnoxious, and ultimately much more vulnerable than he first appears. The narrator admires him but also recognizes the danger in his friend's need to control every room he enters. As the trip progresses, that dynamic changes. Ireland becomes a place where Paradise's usual tools—humor, charm, confidence, and sheer momentum—do not always work.

The most powerful part of the book comes when the travelers reach Belfast and encounter the lingering reality of Northern Ireland's divided history. The narrator describes a landscape of murals, flags, damaged buildings, barriers, and memories that have not disappeared simply because the violence has diminished. Paradise, accustomed to being able to charm his way through unfamiliar situations, suddenly finds himself being judged before he has the opportunity to explain himself. It is a profound reversal for a man who has spent his life reading other people.

Suzanne, the Irish woman the narrator meets early in the journey, becomes equally important to the story. She is much more than a romantic interest. She represents something Paradise and the narrator both struggle to understand: belonging that is earned through staying rather than created through movement. Her observations about the narrator are particularly revealing. She recognizes that he is always simultaneously living an experience and standing outside it, watching himself experience it. As a writer, he turns life into material—but Suzanne challenges him to actually inhabit his life rather than merely observe it.

Hopson's prose is highly visual and frequently lyrical. Ireland becomes almost another character, with its fog, stone walls, sheep, winding roads, pubs, cliffs, rivers, and Atlantic coastline. There are many memorable observations, and the author has a strong instinct for finding meaning in seemingly ordinary moments. The scenes in the Irish pubs are especially effective because they capture the humor, storytelling, music, and communal quality of the settings.

The book is also very funny. Much of the humor comes from the contrast between the two American travelers and the Irish people they encounter. Their attempts to understand local customs, accents, roads, pubs, and conversational rhythms provide plenty of lighter moments. That humor is important because it prevents the novel from becoming overwhelmed by its more serious themes.

At times, however, the writing is almost too eager to explain its own meaning. Hopson frequently follows an experience with a philosophical interpretation of that experience. Many passages are beautifully written, but the accumulation of metaphors and observations can occasionally slow the narrative. The book would sometimes be even more powerful if it trusted the scenes and characters to communicate their meaning without immediately interpreting them for the reader.

Nevertheless, the novella develops toward a satisfying emotional conclusion. Paradise's transformation is subtle rather than miraculous. He does not cease being Paradise. Instead, the journey strips away some of the mythology surrounding him. The man who always had to be first—the dog who always leapt first—finally learns that there are times when listening, waiting, and simply being present are more meaningful than making an entrance.

The title ultimately becomes a metaphor not just for courage, but for the difference between movement and growth. Sometimes you have to leap. Sometimes you have to stay. And sometimes the hardest lesson is realizing that neither choice guarantees the outcome you want.

Leap of the Dog is an unusual travel story that gradually reveals itself as a story about friendship and self-discovery. Beneath the Irish scenery, pub humor, romance, and adventure is a more intimate examination of two men confronting the limits of the identities they have constructed for themselves.

Recommended for readers who enjoy literary travel fiction, character-driven stories, Irish settings, friendship narratives, and novels that combine humor with deeper questions about identity and belonging.

[Isaiah · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

To see a full review check it out here.

Fast paced, bingeable, and fascinating. I will be reading this one again.