The Animals Inside, the Human in the Animal: Eight Books to Add to Your Winter Reading List

by Ari Blatt

I began writing this sitting two weeks away from the Winter Solstice. It is nothing fresh to say that these days are dark in an overwhelming number of ways, that the Oregon rain where I live is at times relentless, and that in such times I often seek solace from reading to come away feeling energized. The titles included in this list are ones I have read over the past couple years, in times both dark and light, and have influenced my writing practice as it has continued to evolve. 

As a working biologist, I have always taken interest in the doings of the natural world and in places where the mark of humans is lesser. Growing up these were places of refuge and continue to be for me today. However, over the years, pinning my economic livelihood on observing animals in a western scientific manner has meant it takes more intention to feel oneness. Reading and writing works where non-human characters play leading roles, I believe, is an important aspect of the task of bringing humanity back into relationship with more than our ever-lonelier species. Additionally, seeing how many authors are working with animal traits cropping up in their human characters to explore aspects of otherness and othering experiences has been incredibly expansive for me. 

There are so many books I did not include on this list for the sake of space and time, and I have many more on my shelves that fit within this theme that I have yet to read. But here’s a sampling. I hope you, reader, enjoy this ongoing journey as much as I have. 

The Animals Inside

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

Graywolf Press, 2015 

Back in the wee days of the exponential literary exploration I experienced during my MFA, instructor and author Ru Freeman had my fiction cohort read an excerpt of this little novel (114 pages), originally published as a short story titled “A Lick of Night” (which you can read here). The story and novel are told from the perspectives of an academic, creative Dad, his two young and rambunctious Boys, and a slippery Crow as the dad and boys grieve for the sudden loss of his wife and their mother. Crows are likely familiar to readers as a cultural symbol of death, wisdom, prophecy, and trickery. In Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, it is absolutely refreshing how Porter’s Crow speaks with these background associations in mind, and how the dad and boys take Crow’s company in as their new normal. While Crow often speaks rather eloquently, Crow also uses a sort of associative, phonetic speech that reminds readers of the real range of caws, rattles, and clicks that crows in our world perform. For example, on the one hand, Crow says: “In other versions I am a doctor or a ghost. Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things other characters can’t, like eat sorrow un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God.” Then in a matter of pages, Crow says:

Head down, tot-along , looking.

Head down, hop-down, totter.

Look up. ‘LOUD, HARD AND INDIGNANT 

KRAAH NOTES’ (Collins Guide to Birds, p. 45).

Head down, bottle-top, potter.

Head down, mop-a-lot, hopper.

He could learn a lot from me.

That’s why I’m here.

Porter’s writing satisfyingly leaves room for a range of possibilities: Crow is just that, a crow who has entered the house and is now making home there while the family recovers. Or: Crow has somehow physically entered Dad. And/or: Dad turns into Crow from time to time when most grief-struck or grief-stuck. It can be rattling, the animals inside.

Animal Wife by Lara Ehrlich

Red Hen Press, 2020

Within this collection of fifteen short stories, a girl’s mother leaves her and her father to turn (back) into a swan; a scientist dons a highly engineered deer suit to live as one in the wild; and a bear becomes a woman’s welcomed housemate, filling the hole her husband left behind. Many of the other stories included in this collection don’t include animals, but all of them are highly original in their explorations of how women and girls live under or escape from the societal expectations, and often, the male figures, that constrain them. 

The collection begins and ends with the stories “Animal Wife” and “Animal Wife Revisited”, and it is such a pleasure as a writer to see two versions of the same story told from different characters’ perspectives in one place. In the first story, we hear from a daughter’s point of view, and in the last, her mother’s. After being told by her father how he met her mother in “Animal Wife”, the daughter asks her mother for her side of the story, and instead of offering it, her mother “said nothing, only sighed.” In “Animal Wife Revisited” we finally do hear her truth, and come to a greater understanding of just how repressive the daughter’s father was to her mother, how she wandered into a marriage she got stuck being a disassociated self in. Oh, and did I mention she turns (back) into a swan? These and other stories imbue fairy tales and magical realism, come in single paragraphs and multiple pages, and no matter their form, always astound. 

Animal Wife was recommended reading from author and Oregon Literary Arts writing instructor Shilo Niziolek, whose course on magical realism post-MFA reinvigorated my practice.  

Chouette by Claire Oshetsky

HarperCollins, 2021

Tiny, a professional cellist in Sacramento, is pregnant. Her husband, an intellectual property lawyer, is ecstatic. But the baby growing inside Tiny is an owl-baby, which she has been told “will never learn to speak, or love, or look after itself.” Tiny’s pregnancy is relatively uncomplicated but out of the ordinary: while undergoing her first ultrasound, Tiny sees the owl-baby on the monitor with her uterine wall inside her beak, thrashing side to side. When she gives birth, Chouette emerges, with a tufted head, yellow eyes, and scaley skin—a combination the doctors call “consistent with Strigiformes”. As much as Tiny is committed to loving Chouette as she is, her husband is committed to solving Charlotte (the name he calls the baby)’s condition. Tiny changes her life to accommodate Chouette’s nocturnal nature and desire for carrion. Meanwhile, her husband subscribes Charlotte and Tiny to swim therapy, a special school, tough love therapy, a string of specialists who can help (“Doctor Lupron, Doctor 420, Doctor Bleach Cleanse, and Doctor Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation”), finally leading to Doctor Great, who proposes a brain procedure to give Charlotte synthetic intelligence. 

The story is told solely from Tiny’s perspective, and her natural tendency to welcome difference and ambiguity into her world does not allow for what might otherwise be cast with black and white, right and wrong clarity.  Tiny prefers “to speak in metaphor. That way, no logic can trap me, no rule can bind me, and no fact can limit me or decide for me what’s possible.” This is a practice author Claire Oshetsky backs up in an interview with NPR: “to me, saying this child is an owl baby sounded closer to the truth of my experience as a parent than saying my baby was nonconforming or my child was disabled.” 

Whether such an experience directly resonates with readers or not, writers reading may appreciate how this way of thinking makes language malleable. In addition to the frequently used term owl-baby and the names of doctors listed above, readers will encounter dog-people, word-bricks, things-not-food, tumble-brush, mother-love, and a plethora more hybridizations. These words reject binary thinking and say yes/or/and/no, act as nouns and are verbs all at once, and declare that, maybe, the way we think is the way we name is the way we perceive is the way we act.   

When the Whales Leave by Yuri Rytkhu

Translated from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse

Milkweek Editions, 2019

While all of the above titles take a very personal approach to exploring the animals inside of us humans, this book zooms out to the cultural scale, providing both an origin story of the Chukchi people in present day northeast Russia, and, even more broadly, a cautionary tale for all people not to forget our place in nature and relationships to other beings. 

As mentioned in the translator’s note, this is a book written to sing. In the opening, we meet our protagonist Nau, who: “was fast breeze, green grass, wet shingle, high cloud, and endless blue sky, herself and all these things at once.” Then, Nau sees whales spouting near shore, and meets her future partner Reu: “She wanted to touch the gleaming mist, to feel on her skin even just one of those droplets, each shining with a tiny sun.” Reu turns into a man and together, Nau and Reu birth lineages of both whales and humans. Each generation of humans tells stories of their kinship with whales, but progressively their culture becomes more and more distant from their roots to a dire end. 

I found my way to this title via a reading list by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri—another author included further on in this list—published by Electric Literature. Indulge in more recommended titles I haven’t included here. 

The Human in the Animal

The Story of a Goat by Perumal Murugan

Translated from the Tamil by N. Kalyan Raman 

First Grove Atlantic, 2019

This is another title I found via this reading list on Electric Literature. It begins as a fairy tale might, “Once, in a village, there was a goat,” and maintains this familiar kind of narrative voice throughout. The goat we are to follow is named Poonachi by an old farming couple in the Odakkan Hill region of southern India who receive her in a mysterious way: in the arms of a giant man who wants to find caretakers for this runt. Under the old man and especially the old woman’s close care, Poonachi grows stronger and, as the giant promised the old man to convince him to take her, is exceptionally fertile. Poonachi bears seven kids at once, when two to four is considered normal. This, the farmers, villagers, and government officials determine, is a miracle. Even as drought lingers on, the old couple’s fortunes grow for a time by being able to sell Poonachi’s offspring to other wealthier farmers. Poonachi is shown to love her kids, grieve for them when they are sold, long for a particular buck goat, detest the advances of other bucks, and otherwise feel a full range of emotions while enduring the choices the farmers and officials make, and that the changing environment necessitates. As I first read this book, I continuously wondered, is this just Poonachi’s story, or a parable on the importance of reproductive freedom for all women? Or, as I am inclined to interpret now, both of these things?  

When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà

Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem

Graywolf Press, 2022

The perspectives of a storm of lightning, a group of black chanterelles, a Roe deer, a butcher’s dear dog, a bear, and the Pyrenees Mountains themselves enrich and enlarge this story, which without all these non-human voices, might be slightly more simply called a coming-of-age tragic love story with multigenerational origins tied to place. All this, in a little less than 200 pages! 

While the human stories are emotionally compelling on their own, the writing is buoyed to the exemplary in the ways it bends style to portray each non-human voice. For example, in the chapter written from the perspective of black chanterelles, Solà employs lyricism and the 3^rd person, “we” to beautifully illustrate the plurality of being within a mycorrhizal network: 

The cap of one is the cap of us all. The flesh of one is the

flesh of us all. The memories of one are the memories of us all.

The darkness. Yes, the darkness. Like an embrace.

Delicious. Protective. Welcoming. Like a falling. Nascent.

The earth. Like a blanket, like a mother. Black. Damp. We

are all mothers here. We are all sisters. Aunties. Cousins.

Then the rain comes. We remember the rain. We remember

it on our skin, on the dark caps of those who greeted it.

Mmmmm, they said to the rain. Mmmmmm, and they drank it

in. Before. Mmmmmmm, we said, mmmmm, rain. And we

drank it in. 

Join the fungi! Drink this book in. 

What We Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

Tin House, 2022

This collection includes nine short stories, each from the perspective of a different animal or animals.  A donkey disguised as a zebra at a zoo besieged by bombs in Gaza. Bengal tigers starving during drought in the mangrove forests of the Ganges River delta. Migrating Blue whales whose musical navigation and communication network is disrupted by a ship. 

What is remarkable about these stories is how each introduces the reader to different ways of experiencing the world and to whole animal cultures and folklores while never leaving the present concerns of the individual narrating character animal behind. Included in the author’s notes are source articles that informed her writing as well as the framework she used to incorporate these real biological behaviors and interactions with humans into her stories. Altogether, this collection serves as both a model and a how-to guide for writers like me who are interested in writing from non-human perspectives. Originally recommended to me by my MFA advisor and author Beth Alvarado, it took me too long after the program ended for me to find this book, and I am so grateful I finally did!

Fox 8 by George Saunders

Illustrated by Chelsea Cardinal

Penguin Random House, 2013

This is a sweet illustrated short story that can be found as its own coffee table ready hardback. Readers familiar with George Saunders’ work know that he likes to play with form. Fox 8 is no exception, written as a letter from a fox to his human neighbors. Fox 8, our narrator and letter-writer, learned these communication skills “By studying Yuman speech patterns every nite without fale.” It takes a bit of time to get used to this writing style for those who don’t naturally lean towards experimental works, but it is so worth—or as Fox 8 might say—werth it. While humans threaten the foxes’ way of life by encroaching on the forest with new development (ironically and, sadly, realistically named “Fox View Commons”), Fox 8 somehow maintains a view of humans being basically “nise”, or at least nice enough that he thinks their inter-species conflicts might be prevented with a little more communication from both sides. His letter is one that shows fox desires are not unlike our own, to live and raise future generations without feeling fearful. 

Ari Blatt lives on the Oregon Coast and works as a Fisheries Biologist. Her writing can be found in Cirque, Thimble Literary, Eleventh Hour Literary, SHARK REEF, and The Corvallis Advocate. Her short stories have been nominated for the 2026 Best Small Fictions anthology prize through Alt Current Press, as well as longlisted for Uncharted Magazine’s What the Wild Carries Prize. Ari received a MFA in Creative Writing from Oregon State University–Cascades, and is continuing to bring her thesis project, a novel in stories, to its complete form.