The Animal Inside

A team of renowned philosophers and a new generation of thinkers come together to offer the first book-length examination of the relationship between philosophical anthropology and animal studies.

Maxan, a cunning fox, stalks the Leoran capital city of Crosswall as a “shadow”—a lone operative for the city guard who must never be seen or heard, and never engage with the enemy. But when he’s caught in an explosion that levels a city block, the fox ignores his mission and retrieves a dangerous artifact that could bring the whole planet of Herbridia to its knees: the relay, a weapon that turns civilized animals into savage beasts. Maxan must fight to keep the mysterious relay from falling into the hands of those who would abuse its power. There’s just one problem: he doesn’t know who to trust, or why he alone is immune to the deadliest weapon in the world. With Leora on the brink of a massive civil war, can Maxan find his allies in time to save animalkind from itself?

THE ANIMAL IN ME is a picture book for all ages, from toddlers who are just learning to turn pages, to eager, first-time readers. This richly illustrated book encourages children to imagine just what kind of animal they most resemble when they are hungry, sleepy, playing, or even screaming. Animated imagery by award-winning photographer Thomas D. Mangelsen will have children participating in story time and even making up their own scenarios. From hummingbirds to tigers, chipmunks to swans, creatures and their unique behaviors are colorful and fun examples for children to learn more about themselves and the natural world around them.

When Blob the Fish finally wins the title of Ugliest Animal in the World, the fame goes to his head.

Poems following a Black queer woman as she seeks refuge from an unsafe world. Carly Inghram's poems explore the day-to-day experiences of a Black queer woman who is ceaselessly bombarded with images of mass-consumerism, white supremacy, and sexism, and who is forced, often reluctantly, back indoors and away from this outside chaos. The poems in The Animal Indoors seek to understand and define the boundaries between our inside and outside lives, critiquing the homogenization and increasing insincerity of American culture and considering what safe spaces exist for Black women. The speaker in these poems seeks refuge, working to keep the interior safe until we can reckon with the world outside, until the speaker is able to "unleash the indoor news onto the unclean water elsewhere." The Animal Indoors won the 2020 CAAPP Book Price, selected by Terrance Hayes.

With unique personal insight, experience, and hard science, Animals in Translation is the definitive, groundbreaking work on animal behavior and psychology. Temple Grandin’s professional training as an animal scientist and her history as a person with autism have given her a perspective like that of no other expert in the field of animal science. Grandin and coauthor Catherine Johnson present their powerful theory that autistic people can often think the way animals think—putting autistic people in the perfect position to translate “animal talk.” Exploring animal pain, fear, aggression, love, friendship, communication, learning, and even animal genius, Grandin is a faithful guide into their world. Animals in Translation reveals that animals are much smarter than anyone ever imagined, and Grandin, standing at the intersection of autism and animals, offers unparalleled observations and extraordinary ideas about both.

How can literary imagination help us engage with the lives of other animals? The question represents one of the liveliest areas of inquiry in the humanities, and Mark Payne seeks to answer it by exploring the relationship between human beings and other animals in writings from antiquity to the present. Ranging from ancient Greek poets to modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Payne considers how writers have used verse to communicate the experience of animal suffering, created analogies between human and animal societies, and imagined the kind of knowledge that would be possible if human beings could see themselves as animals see them. The Animal Part also makes substantial contributions to the emerging discourse of the posthumanities. Payne offers detailed accounts of the tenuousness of the idea of the human in ancient literature and philosophy and then goes on to argue that close reading must remain a central practice of literary study if posthumanism is to articulate its own prehistory. For it is only through fine-grained literary interpretation that we can recover the poetic thinking about animals that has always existed alongside philosophical constructions of the human. In sum, The Animal Part marks a breakthrough in animal studies and offers a significant contribution to comparative poetics.

What's so special about animal skeletons? Find out in BONES, an inside look at the animal kingdom. How are animals able to bite, run, jump and fly? What special adaptions have they developed over time? Bones takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the biological history of the animal kingdom, with sections focusing on different animal abilities - biting, flying, jaws, tails, and more - explaining how their amazing bodies allow them to do so many different things.