Cat O' Nine Tails — Ben Stoltzfus

Cat O Nine Tails consists of nine stories about cats and how cats have influenced certain characters. Although ostensibly about felines, the stories are also playful postmodern explorations of language, the creative process, images, sounds and cultural practices. The settings are international, and they range from California to New England, southern France, Istanbul and Cuba. The settings are as diverse as the stories. For example, Chapeau is a comic-erotic story about one woman who thinks she is the reincarnation of the Egyptian cat goddess Bastet, and because chat, in French, is the word for cat, and peau is the word for skin, the woman has a predilection for hats, mirrors and her cat o'nine tails. The title of another story, Battery, denotes and conotes the Eveready flashlight battery (9 logo with a black cat), bodily harm, and army artillery. On its readerly level the story is about a boy who thinks cats really do have nine lives. Yet another story, The Sign, generates the sound O and the image of fire. Like Battery, it explores the innocent cruelty of boys toward cats--a cruelty that is mitigated by the linguistic weave and verbal play in which it is embedded. The Obelisk explores one boy's nascent eroticism that is caught between cultural expectations of conformity and foreign temptations. Beautifully written and exceedingly intricate, Cat O Nine Tails embraces the captivity of American literary fiction.