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Fiction Short Stories (single Author)

Her Body Among Animals

by (author) Paola Ferrante

Publisher
Book*hug Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2023
Category
Short Stories (single author), Feminist, Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781771668385
    Publish Date
    Sep 2023
    List Price
    $23.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781771668392
    Publish Date
    Sep 2023
    List Price
    $14.99

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Description

Winner of a 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award
Nominated for a 2023 Shirley Jackson Award
Shortlisted for the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award

In this genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies while living in a world “among animals,” where violence is intertwined with bizarre ecological disruptions.

A sentient sex robot goes against her programming; a grad student living with depression is weighed down by an ever-present albatross; an unhappy wife turns into a spider; a boy with a dark secret is haunted by dolls; a couple bound for a colony on Mars take a road trip through Texas; a girl fights to save her sister from growing a mermaid tail like their absent mother.

Magical yet human, haunted and haunting, these stories act as a surreal documentation of the mistakes in systems of the past that remain very much in the present. Ferrante investigates toxic masculinity and the devastation it enacts upon women and our planet, delving into the universal undercurrent of ecological anxiety in the face of such toxicity, and the personal experience of being a new mother concerned about the future her child will face.

Through these confrontations of the complexity of living in a woman’s body, Her Body Among Animals moves us from hopelessness to a future of resilience and possibility.

About the author

Paola Ferrante is a writer living with depression. Her debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack (2019), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Prize. She has won Grain Magazine's Short Grain Contest for Poetry, The New Quarterly's Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, Room Magazine's Fiction Contest, and was longlisted for the 2020 Journey Prize for the story “When Foxes Die Electric.” Her work appears in After Realism: 24 Stories for the 21st Century (2022), Best Canadian Poetry 2021 (2021), North American Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She was born, and still resides in, Toronto.

Paola Ferrante's profile page

Awards

  • Runner-up, Danuta Gleed Literary Award
  • Nominated, Shirley Jackson Awards
  • Winner, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards

Editorial Reviews

"These stories are electric. Ferrante approaches the short story as a full and beautiful form in itself; while her subject matter is quite dissimilar to the great Alice Munro, her stories are similar in that they contain whole worlds." —The Miramichi Reader

"With a firm grasp of our grim reality, Ferrante daringly explores what it means to be a woman and what it means to live in exposed ecosystems. Readers will take flight with the characters through infinite worlds where realities and unrealities intersect to allow for human metamorphoses, both in body and mind. Her Body Among Animals is a collection of stories that will haunt you even after you put the book down." —Room Magazine

"Ferrante's writing is smart, fast-paced and full of looping sensory images and details that guide her reader into the skin of each deeply fleshed-out and sympathetic character, and zips us into their minds."—Susan Sanford Blades

“Elegant and arresting, the eleven modern fables in Paola Ferrante’s Her Body Among Animals thrum with a desperate, racing pulse as they capture the everyday horrors women live with and the sacrifices—of personhood, opportunity, and safety—their ordinary lives require.” —Foreword Reviews

“A tour de force of storytelling, a powerful, challenging, rewarding experience.” —Toronto Star

“There is no filler here; each story is devastating, brilliantly imaginative, and almost impossible to summarize neatly. Ferrante is a vital new voice in short fiction.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

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