I don’t see footnoting incorporated into fictional narratives quite like it was used here and it was amazing!

The author describes it as "part migration story, part mythological retelling, part queer love story. And all I can really conclude is that I don’t know why this book — an adult contemporary, you might even say literary fiction, book — did what other literary fiction books failed to do and got me enjoying it. her debut novel interrogates not just generational trauma, but also generational myth: the mediums it inhabits (oral, written, the natural world as it is infringed upon by human inventions like war) and the ways it is both muddied and thrown into sharp relief by migration, by desire, by destruction. This book did the same, but it did it in a fabulist, poetic way, so I actually really liked that about it.Written by a zoologist with a flair for storytelling, this is a fascinating celebration of the animal kingdom.

Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visercal debut about one family's queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets.

The characters are casually queer, with sapphic and achillean characters alike, and brief comments on countless genders and non-gendered pronouns in spoken Mandarin. Much of what is covered in the article talks about how the dragon that is mentioned in some of the bestiaries shows a glimpse of the religious significance in many of these tales. Arranged by elements (Earth, Water, Air), The Modern Bestiary contains well-known species told from new, unexpected angles (rats that drive cars; fish that communicate by passing wind), as well as stranger and lesser-known creatures, including carnivorous mice that howl at the moon, cross-dressing cuttlefish, and antechinuses – small marsupials that literally mate themselves to death.

Because many bestiary animals communicated complex religious messages, they often appeared in liturgical and devotional contexts where worshippers could easily link them to Christian ideology. Unfortunately, I was unable to finish the book and made it about of a quarter into it before I had to stop. They and other authors freely expanded or modified pre-existing models, constantly refining the moral content without interest or access to much more detail regarding the factual content. I think I’ve mentioned in a previous review that one of the things that puts me off adult general fiction is a tendency towards the grotesque, in that the writing just has to focus on the grossness of life.Following the Physiologus, Saint Isidore of Seville (Book XII of the Etymologiae) and Saint Ambrose expanded the religious message with reference to passages from the Bible and the Septuagint. So not only do we have cannibalism here, we also have the complex relationship between children and parents. The most widely known volucrary in the Renaissance was Johannes de Cuba's Gart der Gesundheit [7] which describes 122 birds and which was printed in 1485.

It includes both animals that have made headlines and those you’ve probably never heard of, such as skin-eating caecilians, harp sponges, or zombie worms – also known as bone-eating snot flowers. The storytelling is saturated with surrealism, so much so that the main plot arc is nearly lost in the multiple myths and magical realist fables woven in. The cycle of ingestion and excretion leads to cannibalism, and the story of filial piety involving slicing a piece of your thigh to feed and cure your sick parent (割股, gēgǔ) is actual Chinese history. I really loved the voice acting in the audiobook, but stylistic choices within the book’s formatting added a lot to the whole experience. They tilted toward each other, circling, and from the ground it might have looked like they were fighting or dancing.I usually give high marks to books of magical realism that I find wildly inventive but I have to admit I grew tired of this one towards the end. The same character for blue (青, chīng) can be combined with the character fo sky (天, tiān) to mean sky (青天, chīngtiān) and so the sky is blue. hats off to k-ming, whose language lives at the edge of enigmatic, and who manages to be both tender and cruel, restrained and unruly, absurd and exceptionally, painstakingly wise. Grid with Nine Animals (detail) from On the Properties of Things (text in French), French, about 1400–1415; artist unknown, author, Bartholomaeus Anglicus.