From the snake tempting Adam and Eve to the sheep that saved Odysseus from the Cyclops, animals have featured prominently in literature from the very beginning of literature. Today, animals …
Read the review: Animal Tales: Novels old and new that every animal lover should read
Love Story with Birds, by Derek Furr, is a work of literature that defies easy categorization, which is partly why I enjoyed reading it. By way of poems, essays, stories, …
Reading non-fiction books about climate change has, over the years, come to feel like a form of masochism. Rarely do I come away feeling optimistic about the future of this …
We have the pandemic to thank for this eye-opening, empathetic and long-overdue tribute to one of our most misunderstood and widely despised relatives. The rat. And I use relative intentionally …
Read the review: Book Review: Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat
What do we know about life in the ocean, and what can the varied forms of life there teach us about our own lives and selves? These are the questions …
Read the review: Book Review: How Far the Light Reaches: A Life In Ten Sea Creatures
Guest book review by Gene Helfman. “…a woman’s place…is in the wild.” This remarkable book is a memoir, a unique lesson in natural history, a love poem to the wild, …
Read the review: Book Review: Wild Chorus: Finding Harmony with Whales, Wolves, and Other Animals
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.
It was while working on a film script set in the Pacific Northwest that journalist John O’Connor began to see Bigfoot everywhere: “On CBD oil and air fresheners. On car …
The title card at the end of Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, a classic of the New Queer Cinema film movement, reads “Sometimes you have to create your own history.” …
Imagine it is 1866 and you are strolling the streets of New York City. The first thing you might notice are the hundreds upon hundreds of horses pulling people in …
Too often, environmental writers fail to capture the complexities that make their genre so interesting. Instead, they tell tales of good versus evil, of right against wrong. While parts of many stories …