Published in 2021
328 pages
Robin McLean was a lawyer and then a potter for 15 years in the woods of Alaska before receiving her MFA at UMass Amherst in Massachusetts. Her first short story collection Reptile House won the 2013 BOA Editions Fiction Prize. The collection was also a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Prize in 2011 and 2012. McLean’s stories have appeared widely in such places as The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, The Western Humanities Review,The Carolina Quarterly, The Nashville Review, The Malahat Review, Gargoyle, The Common, and Copper Nickel, and others.
A figure skater first—having learned to skate and walk at the same time—McLean believes that crashing on ice prepared her for writing fiction. Besides writing, her careers and interests have been diverse: pushcart hotdog sales, lawyer and mediator, potter and tile maker, political activist, union grievance officer, sculptor, haunted corn maze manager as well as zombie trainer. She currently teaches at Clark University and divides her time between Newfound Lake in Bristol, NH, and a 200-year-old farm in Sunderland, MA.
She grew up in Peoria, Illinois, one of four wild and inventive sisters, all who, like their mother, attended Mount Holyoke College.
What is this book about?
Following in the footsteps of such chroniclers of American lunacy as Cormac McCarthy, Joy Williams, and Charles Portis, Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast is a mind-melting feminist Western that pins a tale of sexual violence and vengeance to a canvas stretching back to prehistory.
With detours through time, space, and myth, not to mention into the minds of a pack of philosophical mules, Pity the Beast heralds the arrival of a major force in American letters. It is a novel that turns our assumptions about the West, masculinity, good and evil, and the very nature of storytelling onto their heads, with an eye to the cosmic as well as the comic. It urges us to write our stories anew – if we want to avoid becoming beasts ourselves.
