Our Book of the Week is The Dominant Animal, a collection of forty compressed stories by Kathryn Scanlan. Scanlan is master of the velocity of her prose, honed to sharpness, careful, devastating, puncturing the imposed limit of the conscious to deliver the reader precisely at the point where rationality, or what passes by that name, flounders in what lies beyond, behind, beneath, or wherever, the point where the unsayable is both revealed and annulled.
>>Read Thomas's review.
>>'Fable.'
>>'The Marriage Finger.'
>>'The Imprecation.'
>>'The Poker.'
>>Scanlan reads 'Vagrants' in her living room.
>>In conversation with Kate Zambreno.
>>What are Scanlan's preferred objects?
>>"Compression indicates pressure is being applied to create a reduction in volume."
>>"I try to write a sentence as unbudging and fully itself as some object sitting on a shelf."
>>"I’m motivated by the energy and nonverbal communication offered to us by animals."
>>Converting anger to creative energy.
>>"Is this sort of timelessness purposeful?"
>>A world of human failure.
>>Aug 9—Fog.
>>The page repurposed as a stage.
>>Read The Dominant Animal!