We the Animals

We the Animals
Author: Justin Torres
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2011-08-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0547577001

The critically acclaimed debut from the National Book Award–winning author of Blackouts. In this award-winning, groundbreaking novel, Justin Torres plunges us into the chaotic heart of one family, the intense bonds of three brothers, and the mythic effects of this fierce love on the people we must become. “A tremendously gifted writer whose highly personal voice should excite us in much the same way that Raymond Carver’s or Jeffrey Eugenides’s voice did when we first heard it.” —The Washington Post Three brothers tear their way through childhood—smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful. “We the Animals is a dark jewel of a book. It’s heartbreaking. It’s beautiful. It resembles no other book I’ve read.” —Michael Cunningham “A fiery ode to boyhood. . . A welterweight champ of a book.” —NPR, Weekend Edition NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

Writing Animals

Writing Animals
Author: Timothy C. Baker
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2019-01-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030038807

This book surveys a broad range of contemporary texts to show how representations of human-animal relations challenge the anthropocentric nature of fiction. By looking at the relation between language and suffering in twenty-first-century fiction and drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches, Baker suggests new opportunities for exploring the centrality of nonhuman animals in recent fiction: writing animal lives leads to new narrative structures and forms of expression. These novels destabilise assumptions about the nature of pain and vulnerability, the burden of literary inheritance, the challenge of writing the Anthropocene, and the relation between text and image. Including both well-known authors and emerging talents, from J.M. Coetzee and Karen Joy Fowler to Sarah Hall, Alexis Wright, and Max Porter, and texts from experimental fiction to work for children, Writing Animals offers an original perspective on both contemporary fiction and the field of literary animal studies.

Speaking for Animals

Speaking for Animals
Author: Margo DeMello
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2013
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0415808995

This text contributes to the growing field of human-animal studies by examining the human impulse evidenced inblogs, social networking sites, video games, comic books, and animal welfare literature to ventriloquize the animal voice.

Animals Welcome

Animals Welcome
Author: Peg Kehret
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2012-08-16
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1101574941

A moving memoir from an award-winning author A mother cat and her kittens, shot with a pellet gun. A poacher illegally stalking a bear. Peg Kehret tells these true stories and more as she invites readers into her life on a small wildlife sanctuary. Vividly showing the joys of animal rescue while providing facts about the animals and birds she encounters, Kehret also shares the tragedy of her husband's sudden death, and the pain of losing Pete, the shelter cat who co-authored three of her books. Written with honesty, heart, and humor, Animals Welcome is a personal glimpse into the life of an author who loves animals, and the philosophy by which she lives.

Fight Write

Fight Write
Author: Carla Hoch
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2019-06-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1440300739

Whether a side-street skirmish or an all-out war, fight scenes bring action to the pages of every kind of fiction. But a poorly done or unbelievable fight scene can ruin a great book in an instant. In Fight Write you'll learn practical tips, terminology, and the science behind crafting realistic fight scenes for your fiction. Broken up into "Rounds," trained fighter and writer Carla Hoch guides you through the many factors you'll need to consider when developing battles and brawls. • In Round 1, you will consider how the Who, When, Where, and Why questions affect what type of fight scene you want to craft. • Round 2 delves into the human factors of biology (think fight or flight and adrenaline) and psychology (aggression and response to injuring or killing another person). • Round 3 explores different fighting styles that are appropriate for different situations: How would a character fight from a prone position versus being attacked in the street? What is the vocabulary used to describe these styles? • Round 4 considers weaponry and will guide you to select the best weapon for your characters, including nontraditional weapons of opportunity, while also thinking about the nitty-gritty details of using them. • In Round 5, you'll learn how to accurately describe realistic injuries sustained from the fights and certain weapons, and what kind of injuries will kill a character or render them unable to fight further. By taking into account where your character is in the world, when in history the fight is happening, what the character's motivation for fighting is, and much more, you'll be able write fight scenes unique to your plot and characters, all while satisfying your reader's discerning eye.

Writing About Animals in the Age of Revolution

Writing About Animals in the Age of Revolution
Author: Jane Spencer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-06-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019259947X

What did British people in the late eighteenth century think and feel about their relationship to nonhuman animals? This book shows how an appreciation of human-animal similarity and a literature of compassion for animals developed in the same years during which radical thinkers were first basing political demands on the concept of natural and universal human rights. Some people began to conceptualise animal rights as an extension of the rights of man and woman. But because oppressed people had to insist on their own separation from animals in order to claim the right to a full share in human privileges, the relationship between human and animal rights was fraught and complex. This book examines that relationship in chapters covering the abolition movement, early feminism, and the political reform movement. Donkeys, pigs, apes and many other literary animals became central metaphors within political discourse, fought over in the struggle for rights and freedoms; while at the same time more and more writers became interested in exploring the experiences of animals themselves. We learn how children's writers pioneered narrative techniques for representing animal subjectivity, and how the anti-cruelty campaign of the early 1800s drew on the legacy of 1790s radicalism. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Clare, Southey, Blake, Wollstonecraft, Equiano, Dorothy Kilner, Thomas Spence, Mary Hays, Ignatius Sancho, Anna Letitia Barbauld, John Oswald, John Lawrence, and Thomas Erskine are just a few of the writers considered. Along with other canonical and non-canonical writers of many disciplines, they placed nonhuman animals at the heart of British literature in the age of the French Revolution.

Rough Animals

Rough Animals
Author: Rae DelBianco
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2018-06-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1628729740

The 25 Best Thriller Books of the Summer—New York Post Best New Books Coming Out Summer 2018 —Southern Living 46 Great Books to Read This Summer—Nylon Dazzling Debuts"—WYPR, "The Weekly Reader" Summer Thrillers That Will Have You at the Edge of Your Chaise Lounge—Refinery29 8 New Books You Should Read This June—vulture.com What We Read, Watched, and Listened to in May—Outside “Furious and electric . . . a fever dream."—Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review!* Breaking Bad meets No Country for Old Men... Ever since their father's untimely death five years before, Wyatt Smith and his inseparably close twin sister, Lucy, have scraped by alone on their family's isolated ranch in Box Elder County, Utah. That is until one morning when, just after spotting one of their steers lying dead in the field, Wyatt is hit in the arm by a hail of gunfire that takes four more cattle with it. The shooter: a fever-eyed, fearsome girl-child with a TEC-9 in her left hand and a worn shotgun in her right. They hold the girl captive, but she breaks loose overnight and heads south into the desert. With the dawning realization that the loss of cattle will mean the certain loss of the ranch, Wyatt feels he has no choice but to go after her and somehow find restitution for what's been lost. Wyatt's decision sets him on an epic twelve-day odyssey through a nightmarish underworld he only half understands; a world that pitches him not only against the primordial ways of men and the beautiful yet brutally unforgiving landscape, but also against himself. As he winds his way down from the mountains of Box Elder to the mesas of Monument Valley and back, Wyatt is forced to look for the first time at who he is and what he’s capable of, and how those hard truths set him irrevocably apart from the one person he’s ever really known and loved. Steeped in a mythic, wildly alive language of its own, and gripping from the first gunshot to the last, Rough Animals is a tour de force from a powerful new voice.

The Tourist Trail

The Tourist Trail
Author: John Yunker
Publisher: Ashland Creek Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2010-08-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1618220020

"Throughout the book, the passions and sincerity of animal advocates are captured with immense respect…the story becomes unstoppable." — Animal Legal Defense Fund The Tourist Trail is at once a romance, an adventure story, an environmental polemic, and a keen study of just how animalistic humans are. —Phoebe Literary Journal The Tourist Trail will challenge your perceptions of villains and innocent victims, and make you question whose side you’re on as each character grapples with his or her own authenticity, with what’s worth fighting for, and faces the realization that no matter how fast you run, you can never escape from yourself. — IndieReader Throughout the book, the passions and sincerity of animal advocates are captured with immense respect…the story becomes unstoppable. — Animal Legal Defense Fund Biologist Angela Haynes is accustomed to dark, lonely nights as one of the few humans at a penguin research station in Patagonia. She has grown used to the cries of penguins before dawn, to meager supplies and housing, to spending most of her days in one of the most remote regions on earth. What she isn’t used to is strange men washing ashore, which happens one day on her watch. The man won’t tell her his name or where he came from, but Angela, who has a soft spot for strays, tends to him, if for no other reason than to protect her birds and her work. When she later learns why he goes by an alias, why he is a refugee from the law, and why he is a man without a port, she begins to fall in love—and embarks on a journey that takes her deep into Antarctic waters, and even deeper into the emotional territory she thought she’d left behind. Against the backdrop of the Southern Ocean, The Tourist Trail weaves together the stories of Angela as well as FBI agent Robert Porter, dispatched on a mission that unearths a past he would rather keep buried; and Ethan Downes, a computer tech whose love for a passionate animal rights activist draws him into a dangerous mission.

Animal Writing

Animal Writing
Author: Danielle Sands
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2019-08-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474439055

Combining recent insights from animal studies, critical plant studies and the new materialisms, Danielle Sands reads fiction and philosophy alongside each other to propose a method of thinking of and with animals that draws on a bestiary of affects. She challenges the claim that empathy should be primary mode of engagement with nonhuman life. Instead, she looks at the stories that we tell, and are told, by insects - beings at the edges of animal life. The indifference, even disgust, that these creatures evoke in us forms the basis for a new ethics not limited by empathy. Along the way she encounters fiction writers Yann Martel, Karen Joy Fowler, Han Kang and Jim Crace beside the philosophy of Graham Harman, Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida and Roger Caillois.