Invisible Beasts

by Sharona Muir

Overview

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist
Orion Book Award Finalist
O, The Oprah Magazine “Title to Pick Up Now”

“An amazing feat of imagination.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It’s wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.” —ANTHONY DOERR, author of All the Light We Cannot See and The Shell Collector

Sophie is an amateur naturalist with a rare genetic gift: the ability to see a marvelous kingdom of invisible, sentient creatures that share a vital relationship with humankind. To record her observations, Sophie creates a personal bestiary and, as she relates the strange abilities of these endangered beings, her tales become extraordinary meditations on love, sex, evolution, extinction, truth, and self-knowledge.

In the tradition of E.O. Wilson’s Anthill, Invisible Beasts is inspiring, philosophical, and richly detailed fiction grounded by scientific fact and a profound insight into nature. The fantastic creations within its pages—an ancient animal that uses natural cold fusion for energy, a species of vampire bat that can hear when their human host is lying, a continent-sized sponge living under the ice of Antarctica—illuminate the role that all living creatures play in the environment and remind us of what we stand to lose if we fail to recognize our entwined destinies.

Sharona Muir is the author of The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father’s Lives. The recipient of a Hodder Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, her writing has appeared in Granta, Orion magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and English at Bowling Green State University. Invisible Beasts is her first novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934137802
Publisher:	Bellevue Literary Press
Publication date:	07/15/2014
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sharona Muir is the author of The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father’s Lives, a collection of poetry, a collection of literary criticism, and the novel Invisible Beasts (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in 2014). Her writing has appeared in Granta, Orion magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, Paris Review, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University; two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships; the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellowship; the Bernard F. Connors Prize, and other awards. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing and English at Bowling Green State University.

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/14/2014
Lines blur between the human and animal worlds in this richly detailed debut from Muir (The Book of Telling), which is part fantasy novel, part field guide. Imbued with a rare power to detect animals invisible to all humans except for a few of her family members, amateur naturalist Sophie takes the reader on a tour of nature as she sees it. Arranged like a bird-watching book, but with creatures that even the sharpest of naturalists couldn’t identify, the book is filled with minute details about each species’ origin and habits, along with keen insights on what the beasts have taught her about human nature. Some of the animals depicted, and their interactions with the human world, are humorous (particularly the Wild Rubber Jack, which, as Sophie bluntly states, is “an invisible American ass”); others provide insight into Sophie’s character (she faces an existential dilemma over whether or not to reveal the Feral Parfumier Bee’s existence to her biologist sister). In Sophie’s struggles to find her footing in a world only she and a few others can see, Muir expertly pinpoints the frailty of the human condition. This is an amazing feat of imagination. (July)

Publishers Weekly

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist
Orion Book Award Finalist
O, The Oprah Magazine “Title to Pick Up Now”
BuzzFeed “Book To Dive Into”
Brooklyn Book Festival “Most Impressive Debut Novelist”
Kenyon Review “Holiday Reading Recommendation”
Publishers Weekly “First Fiction” & “Book of the Week” selection
Library Journal “Top Indie Fiction” selection

“This environmental fable—as if Where the Wild Things Are had been written by Rachel Carson—is a lyrical field guide . . . as well as a commentary on extinction and being alive.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Muir astounded this reader. Liltingly physical, metaphorically sound, elusively knowing, her language is paint and clay and vibration.” —International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist citation, Hartford Public Library

“[An] imaginative menagerie comes to life in [Muir’s] novel Invisible Beasts.” —Sentinel-Tribune

“Wonderful and unusual.” —Orion Magazine

“Vividly portrayed.” —Locus

“A wild and woolly hybrid that refreshingly defies classification. . . . Compelling throughout . . . it’s the literary lovechild of Lewis Carroll and Rachel Carson filtered through the lens of zoology’s godfather, Darwin himself.” —Bostonia

“An imaginative, delightful field guide to animals that seem to be visible to only a few people—including amateur naturalist and narrator Sophie. As her detailed descriptions of the fantastic creatures unfold, Sophie reveals a bit about human nature.” —Stanford Magazine

“At once a celebration of the power of imagination and a requiem for the species we’re losing every day. Both moving and often surprisingly funny, it’s a seductive work of speculative naturalism that has its hands in the dirt and its head in the clouds.” —Kenyon Review

“Brilliant. . . . With a light, witty, but heartwrenching touch, without preaching or hectoring in any form, Muir reveals, through the stories of her magnificent, funny, endearing invisible animals and their perils and extinctions, the anthropocentric obtuseness and mindless, casual as well as purposeful devastation of the environment and the mass slaughter of life forms, including ourselves, that puts all of us—animals, vegetables, and minerals—in dire peril.” —Women’s Review of Books

“Sensitive and elegant . . . funny and tender. . . . Beasts, a category used here in all its expansiveness, includes everything from the human to the microbe. This book is a wondrous testament to those relationships, interdependencies, and affinities. Invisible Beasts makes the bestiary a document of profoundly human dimensions, and offers to all readers, whether devotees of science or of fantasy, very real pleasures.” —io9

“An absolute delight. . . . This smart, whimsical novel takes readers not only into a world of ‘invisible beasts’ but into the mind of a charmingly quirky character.” —EcoLit Books

“An erudite guidebook to the ‘animals’ that walk unseen among us.” —LitReactor

“Full of language that is at once passionate and precise, flowery and full of information, [Invisible Beasts] is bursting at the seams with a strange duality, a dizzying mash-up of romanticism and science.” —Collagist

“Lines blur between the human and animal worlds in this richly detailed debut. . . . In Sophie’s struggles to find her footing in a world only she and a few others can see, Muir expertly pinpoints the frailty of the human condition. This is an amazing feat of imagination.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Playfully and thoughtfully underlines the pain and loss of extinction . . . combin[ing] fact and imagination in 20 fables narrated by an amateur naturalist. . . . A marvelous capsule of natural history . . . not to mention crackling suspense.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The various fantastical beings presented here are described in careful scientific detail with results that are weird, whimsical, and somewhat unsettling. Like very fractured Just So Stories.” —Library Journal

“Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It’s wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.” —ANTHONY DOERR, author of All the Light We Cannot See and The Shell Collector

“In this twenty-first century, there’s no one like Sharona Muir who can write, in bright accurate language, animals real or imaginary in an updated bestiary that riffs on evolution, extinction, and what it means to be human among other species. We need this view, and you’ll be right there with her on every page of Invisible Beasts.” —JOHN FELSTINER, author of Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

“Invisible Beasts is a delightful and stunning feat of environmental imagination, endlessly enjoyable and fascinating. With the deep inventiveness of Ursula Le Guin and the quirky vitality of Annie Dillard, Sharona Muir seduces us into a cautionary world full of creatures, at once fanciful and utterly convincing, who hold unexpected lessons for ourselves.” —ROBERT FINCH, author of A Cape Cod Notebook and co-editor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing

“Many writers are inspired by symbiology—the interdependence of nature, culture, and technology—but Muir’s intelligence and breadth of knowledge are exceptional. You could not find a better little book of ethics, politics, and ecology for our time.” —REGENIA GAGNIER, author of The Insatiability of Human Wants and Individualism, Decadence and Globalization

“If you’ve lost your capacity to wonder at the myriad forms of life swarming, burrowing, swooping, and gamboling around you—and inside you—then look no further. Equal parts science and imagination, Invisible Beasts takes us on a journey to another world that turns out to be our world, as if seen and experienced for the first time. If you’re interested in what it means to be alive, and share life, then read this book.” —CARY WOLFE, author of Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame and What is Posthumanism?

From the Publisher

2014-06-05
An eccentric bestiary that playfully and thoughtfully underlines the pain and loss of extinction.Muir (The Book of Telling, 2005, etc.), an academic, poet and essayist, combines fact and imagination in 20 fables narrated by an amateur naturalist named Sophie who has the ability to see invisible creatures. Without getting too didactic, each tale conveys a lesson about the beauty, fragility and complexity of living things. Humor and barbs come through in comments on politics, Wall Street and other subjects. There’s an invisible jackass that kicks people intent on making deals and money. “The Spiders of Theodora” offers Swiftian satire on the customs of a town like Washington, D.C. The sad “The Foster Fowl” touches on climate change and the role of even caring humans in hastening extinction. In "The Oormz," that cloudlikebeing drapes its faint cashmere self comfortingly over Sophie’s head and shoulders, helping dispel dark moods and recall memories of “the first spring I’d ever seen.” “The Golden Egg” is a marvelous capsule of natural history spanning many eons. “The Hypnogator,” with its mesmerizing reptile, stands out as one of the few tales (“The Foster Fowl” is another) with the heft of a good short story, not to mention crackling suspense. Sophie sometimes consults her biologist sister, Evie, who adds to a stratum of science that runs through the fantasy like a long, faith-building footnote for the dubious reader. In stark moments, the real world sounds like this: The “mass extinction” of species “is the only one caused by a single organism capable of seeing the big picture, understanding its own destructive role, and changing that.”One doubt Muir doesn’t quell is whether such a fanciful treatise has a chance of enlightening that organism, but she deserves a good-size audience to give the experiment a fair shot.

Kirkus Reviews