Bestiary

Product Information

Griffin (detail) from Book of Flowers (text in Latin), French and Belgian, 1460; artist unknown, author, Lambert, canon of Saint Omer.

It breaks apart conventions of the English language with abandon and straddles the space between genres. in " The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly " Publishing This Week" newsletter.

The most widely known volucrary in the Renaissance was Johannes de Cuba's Gart der Gesundheit [7] which describes 122 birds and which was printed in 1485. Even beyond the European Christian tradition, the use of animals as allegories for human virtues and vices was a widespread phenomenon that underscores the capacity of beasts to serve as moral exemplars. I wanted to bring a similar playful energy, and in the novel, I tried experimenting with form by incorporating footnotes, vignettes, and oral histories, creating a queer and matriarchal story in which the narrator doesn’t necessarily need to look to the “outside” world for what’s possible – rather, she grapples with what she’s inherited, deciding what lineages she wants to be a part of.

The contents of medieval bestiaries were often obtained and created from combining older textual sources and accounts of animals, such as the Physiologus.in fact, bestiary might be best described as a pummeling—wild, brash, rendered in brutal, bruise-like color. All the Western stereotypes you’ve heard about East Asian people (that we are desexualized, sanitized, emotionally conservative, deferent model minorities)? It's fitting, then, that K-Ming Chang's debut novel is titled Bestiary, for it too is a compendium of real and mythical beasts — some human, some animal, most a bit of both — that roam through a family's lineage and the stories its members tell each other from one generation to another. Collectively the book shows that the aesthetic encounter, by nature affective, is by nature also interdisciplinary and motivating, and that it spurs the critical in addressing the complex issues of 'humananimality'.