Tag: Animals

Gaitskill’s Fictions of Disappointment

In “A Romantic Weekend,” a story from Mary Gaitskill’s first collection, Bad Behavior, a man and a woman who are only casually acquainted go out of town for the weekend. The two seem to have met in a ...

How to Write about Videogames

I remember his blue-plastic hair, drawn back in a little bun that looked octagonal. I remember the pointy hat that crowned him in the eyes of other players: “Sorcerer’s petasos +1,” the “+1” ...

What to Do If Yer Bit By a Snake

This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on ...

Unstill Life

English nature writing has never been all that natural. While their American counterparts tend to imagine natural landscapes as “the last remaining place where civilization … has not fully infected ...

Canine Control

Kornél Mundruczó’s White God has one of those premises that feels unique but also strangely inevitable: a mixed-breed dog named Hagen, abused by everyone except the 13-year-old girl who loved him ...

Invasion of the Funny Animals

“Funny Animals” is a genre of comics that is, like most things in comics, inappropriately named. Just as “comics” are quite often not comic and “graphic novels” are rarely novels, comics featuring anthropomorphic animals are only occasionally funny ...

The Laughing Animal

Karen Joy Fowler’s most recent novel is a glimmeringly dark and clever book about the possibility of mutual happiness between human and nonhuman animals. Like much contemporary fiction, We Are All ...

Animal Feelings

We read stories of how, after losing their companions, dogs and bunnies refuse to eat; ducks and horses exhibit nervousness and social anxiety; dolphins strand themselves ...

A World Where We Are All Autistic

On a memorable spring evening in 2002, the philosopher Peter Singer welcomed disability rights advocate Harriet McBryde Johnson to speak at Princeton University. The event was controversial, given ...

Into the Crud

How can a book transform how we think about the human? It is one thing to claim for oneself, as does a character in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a dispossession so thorough that she lives with “No ...