Animal Quintet
We are eager to start publicizing and promoting Animal Quintet by Professor Colin Dayan, to be published by the Los Angeles Review of Books on December 8, 2020.
About the book:
In this haunting, lyrical, luminous book, Colin Dayan meditates on her family history, her relationship with animals, and her upbringing in the South. Examining memories, family documents, and photographs, Animal Quintet takes a raw look at racial tensions and bourgeois respectability in a region struggling to change. Famed Southern war horses ridden by Civil War generals, doomed Spanish fighting bulls, the misunderstood possum hunted by generations of Southerners, and the chickens slaughtered by family servants—these animals frame and inform a haunting picture of a doomed childhood in a riven society.
In these stories, Dayan asks readers to envision another political life, a reorientation of our ways of seeing and thinking, to examine our ethical and conceptual assumptions from the perspective of other creatures, to imagine an alternative way of being in the world, of thinking and loving. Animal Quintet is a coming-of-age story that depends on an unexpected attentiveness, on another kind of intelligibility beyond the world of the human.
About the author:
Colin Dayan spent her formative years in Atlanta before escaping to study in the Northeast. An expert on Poe and Melville, Haiti, and Caribbean literatures, she is the author of Haiti, History, and the Gods, The Story of Cruel and Unusual, and the award-winning The Law is a White Dog. She has written on prison rights, the legalities of torture, canine profiling, animal law, and the racial contours of US practices of punishment for The Boston Review, The New York Times, The London Review of Books, and Al Jazeera America, where she was a contributing editor. Now, with a sensibility marked by the South, she writes about race hatred and terror, dogs, humans, and other animals on a terrain scarred by her Southern past.
Colin Dayan is also the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
