Description:
In this genre-defying novel, Patrick Lawler crafts a kaleidoscopic dialogue between twenty-four extinct animals and the humans haunted by their absence. Blending eco-fiction, psychological inquiry, and lyrical storytelling, the book unfolds as a surreal therapy session, a love letter, and a suicide note--field notes from the edge of extinction that ask what it means to live, remember, and tell stories in a world unraveling.
Review Quotes:
"Patrick Lawler's brilliant and timely new novel is Conversation With Extinct Animals, which slyly invites and eludes ideas of what is real. The story is told by an unreliable narrator who admits, "In my dream I am erased." In an oddly humorous twist, the extinct animals are further removed from reality by being sketches in a cryptic place called The Facility. Demonstrating his unique poetic sensibility, and the inclusion of actual poems, Lawler keeps the search for what's real both entertaining and intensely introspective." --Mary McLaughlin Slechta, author of Mulberry Street Stories
"Patrick Lawler's compact book of precise prose (and poetry) fairly bursts with ironies and revelations. The narrator of Conversations with Extinct Animals lives with a few other "characters" in the Facility, which may be a mental institution or may be the world. He looks at the images of extinct animals--toolache wallaby, Socorro dove, et al.--on the walls and contemplates dualities: life/death, reality/dream, truth/lies, etc. What he comes up with is a Pointillist picture of the world as it once was, as it is, and as it may very possibly become."--Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Safe Colors