What We Fed to the Manticore
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction. Finalist for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
A Ms. Magazine, Bustle, Publishers Weekly, Chicago Review of Books, Debutiful, and ALTA Journal Best Book of September
An Orion Best Book of Fall
In nine stories that span the globe, What We Fed to the Manticore takes readers inside the minds of a full cast of animal narrators to understand the triumphs, heartbreaks, and complexities of the creatures that share our world.
Through nine emotionally vivid stories, all narrated from animal perspectives, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s debut collection explores themes of environmentalism, conservation, identity, belonging, loss, and family with resounding heart and deep tenderness. In Kolluri’s pages, a faithful hound mourns the loss of the endangered rhino he swore to protect. Vultures seek meaning as they attend to the antelope that perished in Central Asia. A beloved donkey’s loyalty to a zookeeper in Gaza is put to the ultimate test. And a wounded pigeon in Delhi finds an unlikely friend.
In striking, immersive detail against the backdrop of an ever-changing international landscape, What We Fed to the Manticore speaks to the fears and joys of the creatures we share our world with, and ultimately places the reader under the rich canopy of the tree of life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The unifying premise of Kolluri's exquisite debut collection—stories narrated from various animal perspectives—might seem gimmicky or cute, but it's neither. Instead, these nine exceptional stories, centered on a variety of mammal and bird species and set in global locations ranging from the Sundarbans to the open ocean, from the arctic to Delhi, feel both timeless and urgent. Each deal in some way with the disruptions wrought by humans on the natural world and on nonhuman species. These include war ("The Good Donkey," set in a Gaza zoo), hunting and poaching (in a pair of nearly unbearably sad stories, one set in Yellowstone, the other in Kenya), and technological disruptions. Perhaps inevitably, climate change is either explicitly or implicitly at the heart of several of these tales, including the title story, in which man-eating tigers realize there's something menacing their home that's even more dangerous than their own kind. A list of sources points to the real-world incidents and phenomena that inspired Kolluri, such as an Atlantic article titled "Why Did Two-Thirds of These Weird Antelope Suddenly Drop Dead?"; the context serves to make the author's treatment that much more remarkable. Joy might understandably be in short supply in settings defined by mass extinctions and climate crisis, but the exceptional closer, "Let Your Body Meet the Ground," soars on the promise of human kindness, no matter how small. This remarkable collection leaves an indelible mark.
Customer Reviews
my view
it’s a touching reality of how us as a species are terrible