HER BODY AMONG ANIMALS

In this début collection of short stories, women confront and challenge the realities of living in a magic-inflected world among animals, where violence is intertwined with ecological disruptions.

In these stories, an albatross threatens to consume a depressed grad student. A sentient sex robot causes the relationship between her creators to go up in flames. Ghosts and climate grief haunt a young mother who worked in horror films. The lines between urban legends and reality blur when a woman's partner turns into a dragon. Blending the magic-inflected worlds underscored by emotional realism of Karen Russell, the equal parts ordinary and bizarre universes of Kelly Link, and the genre-bending of Carmen Maria Machado, these speculative tales weave elements of horror, fairy tales, and science fiction to underscore the complexity of living in a woman's body in the face of the violence and ecological calamity wrought by toxic masculinity.

Paola Ferrante's debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack (Mansfield Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She won Room Magazine‘s 2018 award for fiction, The New Quarterly‘s 2019 Peter Hinchcliffe award for fiction, and Grain Magazine's 2020 Short Grain award for poetry. Her work appears in The Journey Prize Stories 32, Best Canadian Poetry 2021, PRISM International and elsewhere. Find her at www.paolaferrante.com and @PaolaOFerrante.