Overview

Experimenting with a form it describes as the posthumanist fable, this story collection explores humans' relationships with other animals. The volume encompasses various sorts of crossings, such as the routes animals take across borders or divides and the species intermixtures, hybridizations, and blends that lead to more or less profound transformations of the creatures being ""crossed."" Other crossings include traversals of the boundary between life and death, the intermingling of different evolutionary stages, and the combination of real and imagined animals. Some of the stories have nonhuman narrators, including ""The Lost Notebooks of Black Beauty"" and ""Tail of the Devil,"" which is told by the asteroid hypothesized to have caused the K-Pg extinction event 66 million years ago. Others are narrated by humans reassessing their past relationships with animals, as in ""Animal Model."" That tale is told by a researcher whose use of animals in the laboratory boomerangs back on him-and on humans more generally. A gopher tortoise experiencing the threat of extinction brought by climate change, a sage-grouse being fitted with a GPS tracking device, a charlatan getting his comeuppance for exploiting people's grief over deceased pets--these are just some of characters who raise questions about the place of Homo sapiens in the larger community of creatural kinds. Leveraging posthumanist critiques of anthropocentrism, Animal Crossings also draws on the truth-telling proclivities of the ancient genre of the fable to convey truths for our times: the importance of respect, the need to refrain, the world-healing power of not placing oneself in the center of the frame.

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