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The Last Animal by Abby Geni is that rare literary find - a remarkable series of stories unified around one theme: people who use the interface between the human and the natural world to contend with their modern challenges in love, loss, and family life. These are vibrant, weighty stories that herald the arrival of a young writer of surprising feeling and depth.
"Terror Birds" tracks the dissolution of a marriage set against an ostrich farm in the sweltering Arizona desert; "Dharma at the Gate" features the tempest of young love as a teenaged girl must choose between man's best friend, her damaged boyfriend, and a beckoning future; "Captivity" follows an octopus handler at an aquarium still haunted by the disappearance of her brother years ago; "The Girls of Apache Bryn Mawr" details a Greek chorus of Jewish girls at a summer camp whose favorite counselor goes missing under suspicious circumstances; "In the Spirit Room" centers on a scientist suffering the heartbreaking loss of a parent from Alzheimer's while living in the natural history museum where they both worked; in "Fire Blight" a father grieving over his wife's recent miscarriage finds an outlet for comfort in their backyard garden and makes a surprising discovery on how to cherish living things; and in the title story, a retired woman traces the steps of the husband who left her thirty years ago, burning the letters he had sent along the way, while the luminous and exotic wildlife of the Pacific Ocean opens up to receive her.
Unflinching, exciting, ambitious and yet heartfelt, The Last Animal will guide readers through a menagerie of settings and landscapes as it underscores the connection among all living things.
"Starred Review. An entrancing collection, recommended even for those who generally shy away from short story." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. The short stories in Geni's debut collection beautifully reveal how exposure to nature helps people in emotional pain to recover…All ten stories here are wonderfully written, with precise language and a true compassion for the hardships of the characters. Highly recommended." - Library Journal
"Geni's first book puts us on notice. Here is a fiction writer who perceives the many forms of consciousness at work on the planet...Endangerment, disappearance, isolation, love adrift, the attempt to hold on to and define life - Geni illuminates each condition and effort with keen realism and empathetic imagination to wondrously disquieting effect." - Booklist
"I have known for a while that Abby Geni is a brilliant writer, and I'm happy that at last the world will find out." - Dan Chaon, National Book Award Finalist, author of Stay Awake and Await Your Reply
"Combining the cool precision of a naturalist with the heart of a born storyteller, Abby Geni catalogues an astounding array of characters whose lives have been undone by the mysterious departures and disappearances of loved ones. Instead of solving these mysteries, she plunges us deeper into them, and the results, like so many of the creatures in this book, are strange, haunting, and beautiful." - Jim Gavin, Middle Men
"Abby Geni is a sharpshooter, a tamer of wild animals, a clear-eyed wonder. The Last Animal is a phenomenally ambitious debut collection and announces Geni's many talents to the world with the volume of a herd of stampeding elephants." - Emma Straub
"Abby Geni's worlds exist at the boundary between desolation and abundance, civilization and nature, love and loneliness. It is as if everything and everyone in these beautiful stories is at least half wild." - Ramona Ausubel, A Guide to Being Born
"The Last Animal is a work of rare insight and beauty. Abby Geni's vision is expansive and haunting and wholly new, and she illuminates her characters' loneliness and longing in a way that will break your heart." - Karen E. Bender, A Town of Empty Rooms
"It's rare to find a single story that's both highly imaginative while also unflinchingly earnest, thrilling while also deeply moving and wise." - Alan Heathcock, Volt
This information about The Last Animal was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Abby Geni is the author of The Wildlands, The Lightkeepers, The Last Animal, and The Body Farm. Her books have been translated into seven languages and have won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Chicago Review of Books Awards, among other honors. Her short stories have won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open and the Chautauqua Contest and have been published or reprinted in The Missouri Review, Epoch, Ninth Letter, New Stories from the Midwest, and many other journals. Geni is a faculty member at StoryStudio Chicago and frequently serves as Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Name Pronunciation
Abby Geni: Pronounced like genie - jee-nee
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