Book excerpt: A haughty and hilarious cat narrates this tale about seducing a resistant human . . . Anyone who has ever lived with cats knows how cunning, tender, smart, ferocious, underhanded, ingenious, foolish, and completely adorable they can be. These words describe Sugar Zach to a T. This is the epic story of the love between Sugar Zach—in his seventh life, a keenly intelligent and observant cat—and the Damsel, a writer with a frenetic lifestyle and an apparent abhorrence of things feline. Sugar Zach’s powers of observation and analysis are unparalleled, and after six lives lived among people from all walks of life he has countless stories to tell and a remarkable talent for telling them. His real area of expertise, however, lies in his preternatural ability to domesticate his humans—whatever you do, don’t even suggest that the humans are the ones who domesticate him. Yet he is flummoxed by the Damsel’s indifference to his charms. But he is not going to let her coldness stop him: One way or another, he is going to insinuate himself into her life and her art. With wit and a broad repertoire of cultural references, Sugar Zach recounts his days and nights spent with the Damsel in a novel that fits squarely into the illustrious tradition of feline literature à la T. S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Charles Bukowski, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.