Invisible Beasts: Tales of the Animals That Go Unseen Among Us

<b>International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist</b><br><b>Orion Book Award Finalist</b><br><b><i>O, The Oprah Magazine</i> "Title to Pick Up Now"</b> <p>"An amazing feat of imagination." --<i><b>Publishers Weekly</b></i><b> (starred review)</b> </p><p>"<i>Invisible Beasts</i> is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original." --<b>ANTHONY DOERR</b>, author of <i>All the Light We Cannot See</i> and <i>The Shell Collector</i> </p><p>Sophie is an amateur naturalist with a rare genetic gift: the ability to see a marvelous kingdom of invisible, sentient creatures that share a vital relationship with humankind. To record her observations, Sophie creates a personal bestiary and, as she relates the strange abilities of these endangered beings, her tales become extraordinary meditations on love, sex, evolution, extinction, truth, and self-knowledge. </p><p>In the tradition of E.O. Wilson's <i>Anthill, Invisible Beasts</i> is inspiring, philosophical, and richly detailed fiction grounded by scientific fact and a profound insight into nature. The fantastic creations within its pages--an ancient animal that uses natural cold fusion for energy, a species of vampire bat that can hear when their human host is lying, a continent-sized sponge living under the ice of Antarctica--illuminate the role that all living creatures play in the environment and remind us of what we stand to lose if we fail to recognize our entwined destinies. </p><p><b>Sharona Muir</b> is the author of <i>The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father's Lives.</i> The recipient of a Hodder Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, her writing has appeared in <i>Granta, Orion</i> magazine, <i>Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, </i> and elsewhere. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and English at Bowling Green State University. <i>Invisible Beasts</i> is her first novel.<br></p>

• Invisible Beasts: Tales of the Animals That Go Unseen Among Us, (Paperback)
• Author: Bellevue Literary Press
• ISBN: 9781934137802
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2014-07-15
• Page Count: 256