Pets - (Paperback)

About the Book

This anthology collects original writing and art by novelists, poets, and academics about their pets, including a killer chihuahua, a catatonic toy poodle, a contraband cat, a backyard full of endangered desert tortoises, five forgotten parakeets, and a skinny ex-racehorse named Joe. From legends like Ann Beattie and Christine Schutt to indie lit cult figures like Scott McClanahan, this anthology collects writing from some of today's best literary talent.

Book Synopsis

This anthology collects original writing and art by novelists, poets, and academics about their pets, including a killer chihuahua, a catatonic toy poodle, a contraband cat, a backyard full of endangered desert tortoises, five forgotten parakeets, and a skinny ex-racehorse named Joe. From legends like Ann Beattie and Christine Schutt to cult figures like Scott McClanahan and Tao Lin, this anthology collects writing from some of today's best literary talent. Edited by Jordan Castro with contributions by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Ann Beattie, Raegan Bird, Blake Butler, Ryan C. K. Choi, Michael W. Clune, Patty Yumi Cottrell, Annie DeWitt, Chelsea Hodson, Yuka Igarashi, Kristen Iskandrian, Mark Leidner, Tao Lin, Scott McClanahan, Sarah Manguso, David Nutt, Precious Okoyomon, Sam Pink, Nicolette Polek, Kathryn Scanlan, Christine Schutt, and Mallory Whitten.

Review Quotes

"Christine Schutt is already easily among the liveliest stylists of our time, and these eleven stories prove we ain't seen nothing yet. Each is a wonder, pickled in her crystalline idiom and cured under her brutal, astonishing wit." - Claire Vaye Watkins

"Nobody writes like Schutt" - Publisher's Weekly

"[With] her absolute ear and her masterly deadpan humor, the results are dazzling. Beattie is a natural writer. Her prose never preens or tires or obstructs." ―The New Yorker

"Beattie's complexities make us more alert to the layered complexities of our own lives, and the lives of others." ―Los Angeles Times

"Beattie's wit [is] truly unsurpassed in our literature." ―The Washington Post

"Every era has its wise aphorist. Sarah Manguso is ours and joins Marcus Aurelius, Thomas à Kempis, Montaigne." ―Edmund White

"Hodson's essays have such a sexy drama to them―and ultimately it's the romance of just getting through life, the passion that comes from being a wholly alert woman and living to tell about it." ―Miranda July

"I felt I was reading a writer who would tell harder truths than many other writers, and she turns this nerve against herself to good effect." ―Amy Hempel

"I steal language and ideas from Michael W. Clune." ―Ben Lerner

"McClanahan's prose is miasmic, dizzying, repetitive. A rushing river of words that reflects the chaos and humanity of the place from which he hails. He writes in an elliptical fever dream so contagious that slowing down is not an option. It would be like putting a doorstop in front of a speeding train."―The New York Times

"Sometimes he sounds like a thriller writer, sometimes an art critic, sometimes a poet." ―Christian Lorentzen, Vulture

"There's no one who writes quite like [Michael W. Clune]." ―The New Republic

"Wild and chiseled, both." ―Maggie Nelson