JoeAnn Hart

JoeAnn Hart writes about the pervasive and widespread effects of the climate crisis on the natural world and the human psyche. Her most recent book, Arroyo Circle, a story of reclamation in a time of loss, was released by Green Writers Press in 2024. Her other books include the prize-winning environmental and animal fiction collection Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, the crime memoir Stamford ’76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s, as well as Float, a dark comedy about plastics in the ocean published by Ashland Creek Press, and Addled, a social satire. She is a regular reviewer of climate and animal fiction at EcoLit Books.

Bloom Again, A Novel by Marybeth Holleman

by

University of Alaska Press, 2025 Edward O. Wilson, a pioneer of evolutionary biology, once wrote, “Humanities will have to blend with the sciences, because technology is going to demand the …

Read more

Satellite: Essays of Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far by Simmons Buntin

by

Terra Firma Books, Trinity University Press, 2025 This fine collection of essays by Simmons Buntin, Satellite: Essays of Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far, leads with lizards. “They are tidy, …

Read more

Aelian’s On the Nature of Animals

by

A toad can kill just by belching, and the lust of the octopus is blamed for its short lifespan. To produce a mule, the horse owner must give the mare a bad haircut to shame her into having sex with a donkey. The hedgehog is considered a spiteful animal because it urinates on itself when caught, unlike the lynx, who hides its urine until it forms a gem stone.

Such are a few of the many nuggets of animal lore recorded in Aelian’s On the Nature of Animals, a translation of De Natura Animalium by the third century Roman writer Claudius Aelianus, better know as Aelian.