Published in 2020
144 pages
Kathryn Scanlan‘s work has appeared in NOON, Fence, Granta, and Egress. Her debut collection of stories is The Dominant Animal. She lives in Los Angeles.
What is this book about?
A collection of innovative and ambitious short stories from a visionary young literary artist
In The Dominant Animal–Kathryn Scanlan’s adventurous, unsettling debut collection–compression is key. Sentences have been relentlessly trimmed, tuned, and teased for maximum impact, and a ferocious attention to rhythm and sound results in a palpable pulse of excitability and distress. The nature of love is questioned at a golf course, a flower shop, an all-you-can-eat buffet. The clay head of a man is bought and displayed as a trophy. Interior life manifests on the physical plane, where characters–human and animal–eat and breathe, provoke and injure one another.
With exquisite control, Scanlan moves from expansive moods and fine afternoons to unease and violence–and also from deliberate and generative ambiguity to shocking, revelatory exactitude. Disturbances accrue as the collection progresses. How often the conclusions open–rather than tie–up. How they twist alertly. No mercy, a character says–and these stories are merciless and strange and absolutely masterful.
