Her Body Among Animals
In this genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies while living in a world "among animals," where violence is intertwined with bizarre ecological disruptions.
A sentient sex robot goes against her programming; a grad student living with depression is weighed down by an ever-present albatross; an unhappy wife turns into a spider; a boy with a dark secret is haunted by dolls; a couple bound for a colony on Mars take a road trip through Texas; a girl fights to save her sister from growing a mermaid tail like their absent mother.
Magical yet human, haunted and haunting, these stories act as a surreal documentation of the mistakes in systems of the past that remain very much in the present. Ferrante investigates toxic masculinity and the devastation it enacts upon women and our planet, delving into the universal undercurrent of ecological anxiety in the face of such toxicity, and the personal experience of being a new mother concerned about the future her child will face.
Through these confrontations of the complexity of living in a woman's body, Her Body Among Animals moves us from hopelessness to a future of resilience and possibility.
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PAOLA FERRANTE is a writer living with depression. Her debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She has won Grain Magazine's Short Grain Contest for Poetry, The New Quarterly's Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, Room Magazine's Fiction Contest, and was longlisted for the 2020 Journey Prize. Her work appears in After Realism: 24 Stories for the 21st Century, Best Canadian Poetry 2021, North American Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She was born, and still resides in, Toronto.
"Paola Ferrante's monster-haunted stories are as dark as a moonless lake--and as beautiful." --André Forget, Amazon Canada First Novel Award-nominated author of In the City of Pigs.
"The vibrant stories in Paola Ferrante's collection Her Body Among Animals transport the reader to strange, yet achingly familiar territory. Ferrante holds up a funhouse mirror to our contemporary moment with her sharp and dazzling prose . . . These wondrous narratives showcase the infinite scope of the universe and the ways in which we struggle to survive." --Doretta Lau, author of How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?.
"Paola Ferrante's writing is so daring, so sharp and visceral, and yet so effortless. Gorgeous, wry, and unsettling, Her Body Among Animals pulls the reader in and doesn't let go until the final page." --Amy Jones, author of Every Little Piece of Me.
"There is no filler here; each story is devastating, brilliantly imaginative, and almost impossible to summarize neatly. Ferrante is a vital new voice in short fiction." --Publishers Weekly
