Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

INVISIBLE BEASTS

Sharona Muir

Tales of the Animals that Go Unseen Among Us

INVISIBLE BEASTS is a fictional work in which imaginary animals, based on real science, are described by a narrator in a series of playful tales.

Sophie is an amateur naturalist with a rare genetic gift: the ability to see a marvelous kingdom of invisible, sentient creatures that share a vital, symbiotic relationship with humankind. To record her observations, Sophie creates a personal bestiary and, as she relates the strange abilities of these endangered beings, her tales become extraordinary meditations on love, sex, evolution, extinction, truth, and self-knowledge. In the tradition of E.O. Wilson's Anthill, Invisible Beasts is inspiring, philosophical, and richly detailed fiction grounded by scientific fact and a profound insight into nature. The fantastic creations within its pages—an animal egg that uses natural cold fusion for energy, a species of vampire bat that can hear when their human host is lying, a continent-sized sponge living under the ice of Antarctica—illuminate the role that all living creatures play in the environment and remind us of what we stand to lose if we fail to recognize our entwined destinies. This is a book of imaginative fiction. It sits on the same shelf as Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, Anthony Doerr's The Shell Collector, and E.O. Wilson's Anthill, all books of imaginative fiction dealing with nature and science. It joins an emerging tradition that is, in Wilson's words to me, "a new kind of novel and a new way to speak about science ... Science and literature are moving together in this century, and creative writing will be taking a new excitement and luster." Book chapters have been accepted in The Kenyon Review, Orion, Michigan Quarterly Review, and a new arts journal, Ancora Imparo. Clearly, the work appeals to readers who enjoy fiction, literature about nature, and cool ideas in the arts. E.O. Wilson, in a letter, wrote that Sharona's stories had "the same goal" as his own novel, Anthill -- which reaches all three audiences. Sharona Muir is the author of The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father's Lives. The recipient of a Hodder Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, her writing has appeared in Granta, Orion magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor of creative writing and English at Bowling Green State University. Invisible Beasts is her first novel.

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Book Published 2014-07-01 by Bellevue Press

Comments

Publisher’s Weekly pick of the week. Read more...

In this twenty-first century, there’s no one like Sharona Muir who can write, in bright accurate language, animals real or imaginary in an updated bestiary that riffs on evolution, extinction, and what it means to be human among other species. We need this view, and you’ll be right there with her on every page of Invisible Beasts.

... richly detailed debut novel, a blend of fantasy and field guide...In Sophie's struggles to find her footing in a world only she and precious few family members can see, Muir expertly pinpoints the frailty of the human condition as our own struggle to see the world and our place in it.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It’s wonderfully-written, crazily-imagined and absolutely original.

The various fantastical beings presented here are described in careful scientific detail with results that are weird, whimsical, and somewhat unsettling. Like very fractured Just So Stories.

Playfully and thoughtfully underlines the pain and loss of extinction . . . combining fact and imagination in 20 fables narrated by an amateur naturalist. . . . A marvelous capsule of natural history . . . not to mention crackling suspense. Read more...

Many writers are inspired by symbiology—the interdependence of nature, culture, and technology—but Muir’s intelligence and breadth of knowledge are exceptional. You could not find a better little book of ethics, politics, and ecology for our time.

Sharona Muir’s Invisible Beasts is an absolute delight, and not only for animal lovers. This smart, whimsical novel takes readers not only into a world of “invisible beasts” but into the mind of a charmingly quirky character. Read more...

Invisible Beasts is a delightful and stunning feat of environmental imagination, endlessly enjoyable and fascinating. With the deep inventiveness of Ursula Le Guin and the quirky vitality of Annie Dillard, Sharona Muir seduces us into a cautionary world full of creatures, at once fanciful and utterly convincing, who hold unexpected lessons for ourselves.

A Literary Game Changer. Read more...

In a literary world increasingly arranged in tidy genres, Muir offers up a wild and woolly hybrid that refreshingly defies classification. Compelling throughout, this whimsical, wise guide to “the animals that go unseen among us” begs to be read aloud and can be digested front to back as a novel, but would prove equally enthralling cracked open at random. Read more...

This environmental fable—as if Where the Wild Things Are had been written by Rachel Carson—is a lyrical field guide to creatures like Poltergeist Possums and Hypnogators, as well as a commentary on extinction and being alive.

If you’ve lost your capacity to wonder at the myriad forms of life swarming, burrowing, swooping, and gamboling around you—and inside you—then look no further. Equal parts science and imagination, Invisible Beasts takes us on a journey to another world that turns out to be our world, as if seen and experienced for the first time. If you’re interested in what it means to be alive, and share life, then read this book.

For Sharona Muir, the bestiary is a literary genre of its own. Her novel Invisible Beasts is part anthology and part field-guide, but mostly it's the story of a young woman who sees animals nobody else can. Her experiences unfold in the form of a scientific catalog of animals. Read more...