Other Animals: Stories

"Other Animals" is a collection of twelve short stories. Set in Texas, California, Argentina, the Netherlands and the South Pacific, these stories depict change, both ecological and personal. The characters that occupy these transitional spaces exist uneasily in the characteristic isolation of the post-modern world. The default setting of these stories is a precarious hyper-reality: two dying men desecrate a motel pool; a young woman encounters an escaped convict in a grocery store parking lot; a man finds a severed arm on the beach; an unhappy couple vacation in a town plagued by an enormous cloud of flies. These stories engage and reinterpret the traditional, patriarchal mythologies of the American West and, through collage, depict the contemporary West as a landscape haunted by off stage violence and ever engaged in a quiet, but definite, paradigm shift.