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 …
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 …
Random House, 2023 “Shivers of lust passed through his elytra as he found her scent grow stronger,” and there we are, in the head of an Elm Bark beetle, one …
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 …
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, …
While a good many mystery novels have environmental themes, it’s rare to find a book specifically labeled “eco-mystery”—but Jann Eyrich’s new series is just that. The Rotting Whale introduces Hugo Sandoval, …
Sharon J. Wishnow’s debut novel, The Pelican Tide—set on Grand Isle, Louisiana, in 2010, just before the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill—is both an intense environmental disaster story and a …
Ada Limón recalls that soon after being named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, she found herself “staring out the window of my office in the Library of …
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.