In the spring of 2018, the novelist Andrew Sean Greer was working as the director of a writers residency in Tuscany, where his unofficial duties included cleaning up after an incontinent pug. The pug belonged to his boss, a baronessa, and Greer felt the frequent messes had gotten out of hand. “I decided we can’t have this happening at the dinner table,” Greer recounted recently at a coffee shop in the West Village.