City Beasts
Fourteen Stories of Uninvited Wildlife
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
All-new stories about the urban worlds where animals and humans fight, love, and find common ground, from the nationally bestselling author of Cod and Salt.
In these stories, Mark Kurlansky journeys to his familiar haunts like New York’s Central Park or Miami’s Little Havana but with an original, earthy, and adventurous perspective. From baseball players in the Dominican Republic to Basque separatists in Spain to a restaurant owner in Cuba, from urban coyotes to a murder of crows, Kurlansky travels the worlds of animals and their human counterparts, revealing moving and hilarious truths about our connected existence.
In the end, he illuminates how closely our worlds are aligned, how humans really are beasts, susceptible to their basest instincts, their wildest dreams, and their artful survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these pages, Kurlansky (Salt), known for his masterful ability to weave compelling and epic world histories through the lens of a single food or commodity, turns to fiction. The tales share what the subtitle promises animals who become characters in their own right, inserting themselves into people's lives and sometimes taking on tremendous, if not unintended, significance in the process. In The Gloucester Whale Cod," a man from a respected lineage of Italian fishermen in a coastal Massachusetts town risks his pride and his life to keep an enormous whale cod from market. In Miami," the disgruntled Yoni is an Orthodox Jew who takes to feeding the crocodile in his backyard, wondering how to interpret the creature's arrival while he sheds his religious observance. When an exotic bird from Guatemala escapes from the Bronx Zoo and buzzes the Central Park boathouse in Odd Birds in New York," local birdwatchers go to extreme lengths to watch. While the stories are original and often entertaining, there's also a tidiness and methodical quirkiness that come to feel predictable, illustrating Kurlansky's true strength remains with his nonfiction.
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