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No animals we could name : stories
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2012
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Summary

No Animals We Could Name by Ted Sanders

The winner of the Bakeless Prize for Fiction, a bold debut collection

The animals (human or otherwise) in Ted Sanders's inventive, wistful stories are oddly familiar, yet unlike anyone you've met before. A lion made of bedsheets, with chicken bones for teeth, is brought to life by a grieving mother. When Raphael the pet lizard mysteriously loses his tail, his owners find themselves ever more desperate to keep him alive, in one sense or another. A pensive tug-of-war between an amateur angler and a halibut unfolds through the eyes of both fisherman and fish. Andin the collection's unifying novella, an unusual guest's arrival at a party sets idle gears turning in startling new ways.

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Publishers Weekly Review
In Sanders's formally rigorous debut collection, winner of the 2011 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize for fiction, characters have relationships with a variety of animals-domestic, wild, and even imaginary. In "Obit" (which won a PEN/O. Henry Award), the author splits the text into columns to tell dueling stories. "Flounder," the story of a man and a fish, is told from perspectives of both predator and prey. A character builds an array of machines, including a simulacrum of himself, in "Assembly," which Sanders lays out on the page like a poem. The book's centerpiece is the disturbing three-part "Airbag," about a party that leaves three guests-the lovelorn David, a huge dog named Lord Jim, and Dorlene, the seventh shortest person on record-significantly altered by the end of the night. The collection's variations-in both content and form-mean that not every story will work for every reader (more conventional stories deliver the clearest emotional impact), but all 12 are memorable, and such a broad range in a story collection is welcome. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
It's not the animals, but the clueless humans who dominate this amorphous story collection, the author's debut. Of the ten stories (and two short flights of fancy), the longest, "Airbag," has been split into three nonconsecutive segments. It's about a midget, Dorlene, who claims to be the seventh shortest person in the country. She's described almost exclusively in terms of her size; that's reductive, offensively so. She's been brought to a party at a farm outside Seattle; she's a former student of Tom, the host. Dorlene's no higher than crotch level (cue the oral-sex joke). Tom has a truly enormous dog, which he's forgotten to shut away; it looms over Dorlene, who's so panicked she wets herself. The ending will not be pleasant. There is more foolishness in the next longest story: "Putting the Lizard to Sleep." A 5-year-old's pet lizard loses part of its tail and has to be euthanized by the vet. John, the father, had been hoping to retrieve the dead lizard: "I wanted him to see what dead is." But the lizard's already been cremated, so John and his live-in girlfriend pretend they have the dead lizard in a box (it's actually a sausage link). The ponderously delivered moral is that lying to kids doesn't work. The other stories are even less developed. "Opinion of Person" is a study of anomie. Two housemates are united by their loathing of a cat, whose owner is away at work. James, in "Momentary," has lost his hand in an act of self-mutilation. He's under observation in a mental hospital, yet there are no insights into his condition. "The Lion" is just as wispy. A wheelchair-bound woman has made a lion out of fabric. Will it be a Frankenstein's monster? Who knows? And who knows what's going on in "Jane," between the ghost and her sleeping ex-lover? As Sanders writes elsewhere, "Confusion burbles thickly." An awkward start.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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