No Animals We Could Name
Stories
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
No Animals We Could Name by Ted Sanders
The winner of the Bakeless Prize for Fiction, a bold debut collection
The animals (human or otherwise) in Ted Sanders's inventive, wistful stories are oddly familiar, yet unlike anyone you've met before. A lion made of bedsheets, with chicken bones for teeth, is brought to life by a grieving mother. When Raphael the pet lizard mysteriously loses his tail, his owners find themselves ever more desperate to keep him alive, in one sense or another. A pensive tug-of-war between an amateur angler and a halibut unfolds through the eyes of both fisherman and fish. And in the collection's unifying novella, an unusual guest's arrival at a party sets idle gears turning in startling new ways.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Sanders's formally rigorous debut collection, winner of the 2011 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize for fiction, characters have relationships with a variety of animals domestic, wild, and even imaginary. In "Obit" (which won a PEN/O. Henry Award), the author splits the text into columns to tell dueling stories. "Flounder," the story of a man and a fish, is told from perspectives of both predator and prey. A character builds an array of machines, including a simulacrum of himself, in "Assembly," which Sanders lays out on the page like a poem. The book's centerpiece is the disturbing three-part "Airbag," about a party that leaves three guests the lovelorn David, a huge dog named Lord Jim, and Dorlene, the seventh shortest person on record significantly altered by the end of the night. The collection's variations in both content and form mean that not every story will work for every reader (more conventional stories deliver the clearest emotional impact), but all 12 are memorable, and such a broad range in a story collection is welcome.
