The Dominant Animal: Stories — Kathryn Scanlan

Named a Best Book of 2020 by The Guardian, Southwest Review, and Publishers Weekly

"[The stories] are short, but their mood and imagery are lasting, and reflective of brutal truths of the commerce of human civilization . . . chilling, finely tuned pieces on power and survival." --Los Angeles Times

A collection of innovative and ambitious short stories from a visionary young literary artist

In The Dominant Animal -- Kathryn Scanlan's adventurous, unsettling debut collection -- compression is key. Sentences have been relentlessly trimmed, tuned, and teased for maximum impact, and a ferocious attention to rhythm and sound results in a palpable pulse of excitability and distress. The nature of love is questioned at a golf course, a flower shop, an all-you-can-eat buffet. The clay head of a man is bought and displayed as a trophy. Interior life manifests on the physical plane, where characters -- human and animal -- eat and breathe, provoke and injure one another.

With exquisite control, Scanlan moves from expansive moods and fine afternoons to unease and violence -- and also from deliberate and generative ambiguity to shocking, revelatory exactitude. Disturbances accrue as the collection progresses. How often the conclusions open -- rather than tie -- up. How they twist alertly. No mercy, a character says -- and these stories are merciless and strange and absolutely masterful.