The Dominant Animal: Stories — Kathryn Scanlan

The author of 9 -- Fog shares forty stories in “a delightful, mischievous, and mysterious collection that's perfect for fans of Lydia Davis and Mary Ruefle” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

In The Dominant Animal -- Kathryn Scanlan's unsettling debut collection -- compression is key. Sentences have been trimmed and tuned for maximum impact, with an attention to rhythm and sound that give off a pulse of excitability and distress. 

The nature of love is questioned at a golf course, a flower shop, an all-you-can-eat buffet. The clay head of a man is bought and displayed as a trophy. Interior life manifests on the physical plane, where characters -- human and animal -- eat and breathe, provoke and injure each other.

Scanlan moves from fine afternoons to unease and violence -- and from deliberate ambiguity to shocking exactitude -- in this “deeply enjoyable book . . . atmospheric with fear and shock, threat and disorientation” (David Hayden, The Guardian, UK).

Named a Best Book of 2020 by The Guardian, Southwest Review, and Publishers Weekly