After Words: Animal Reflections

Stories, Poetry, and Essays on the Lives of Animals

We live side by side with animals. A flock of pigeons roosting on a rooftop is as apparently ordinary a scene as cats scrapping down the street or squirrels teasing their would-be chasers before turning tail to safety. How often we forget that we, too, are animals, and that our relationships with other animals can help us better understand the world we share with them. How often do we remember that as our ambitions and cities keep growing, the lives of animals among us keep changing? After Words: Animal Reflections questions our place in the world by exploring how animals have visited and haunted our lives and writing.

Curator Christina Claudia Galego frames the issue with new fiction by Meg Elison, winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, and critical poetry by Daniel Scott Tysdal, a ReLit Award recipient and TEDx speaker. Alongside these selections are creative essays, short stories, and poems by Ed Ahern, Mikki Aronoff, Janette Ayachi, Sarah Barr, Evan J. Coleman, Matt Daly, AJ Huffman, Matthew Hollett, Tom Larsen, Wes Lee, Janet McCann, Christopher M. McDonough, Cecile Rossant, Benjamin Paynter, David F. Shultz, Dan Veach, and Melanie Whipman, as well as affecting artwork by JJ Paynter, Dan Veach, Severine Richardson, and Jagoda Woźny.

After Words: Animal Reflections also presents a timely exchange with Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, and a thoughtful interview with Giller Prize-winner André Alexis, author of Fifteen Dogs.

For those who wonder where their dog goes at night, what it’s like to see an elk in the wild, or whether animals are people too, this issue of the London Reader is for you.

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