Description:
Amie Souza Reilly bought an old house in the suburbs. She had just gotten remarried and was looking forward to a new start with her new husband and her six-year-old son. But immediately after moving in, the two brothers who lived next door began an insidious crusade to push them out. They followed her, peered in her windows, stood in her yard, trapped her inside her car. As they broke boundary after suburban boundary, she found herself implicated in their violence.
Human/Animal merges personal narrative and cultural criticism to unleash the complicated relationship between instinct and action, violence and regret. This bestiary-in-essays wrestles with American colonialism, horror films, feminism, and gender studies to confront the intrusive neighbors the author could not. Ultimately, this book asks larger questions about civility, care, and the line between human and animal.
Illustrated with the author's own sketches, Human/Animal grapples not only with Reilly's place in her neighborhood, but with America's past and current political climate.
Brief description: Amie Souza Reilly is an American writer and artist from Milford, Connecticut. She holds an MA in Literature from Fordham University and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Fairfield University. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Atticus Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches and is the Writer-in-Residence at Sacred Heart University.
Review Quotes:
"There are so many
ways to write about violence.' What and where are our edges, these lyric essays
ask, and what will we do, when pushed, to protect them?" -- Irene
Cooper, Los Angeles Review
"Reilly's
curiosity as a writer
makes Human/Animal into a transfixing
horror story, especially as nonfiction. I recommend her book to anyone who
feels stumped at how to live alongside our wolves and remain deeply
human." -- Motif
"Reilly's work is
an ambitious undertaking and begs to be approached slowly, almost as though you
should hold out your hand and let it sniff you before you attempt to rub its
ears." --The Christian
Century
"Reilly comments
on the nature of proximity and familiarity, asking questions about
surveillance, dominance, space, and boundaries. She cleverly weaves parallels
between the animal world and the ways human society has both integrated and weaponized
animal behaviors as tools to establish power over women and minorities. Readers
of experimental essays, memoir, personal essays, and hybrid forms of nonfiction
will delight in the formal distinctiveness
of Human/Animal." -- Kristine Langley
Mahler. author of Curing Season
"Reilly's
situation becomes a microcosm for a much larger pattern of ills within our
society. .... In the end, the particular wrongs of the brothers matter much
less than Reilly's meticulous processing of them. Readers looking for a wide-ranging
meditation on our country's political climate and a host of other issues will
find much food for thought here." -- Washington
Independent Review of Books
"an ambitious,
braided essay collection that resists easy answers because, like walking past
all the houses lined up on a suburban street, there is simply no way to
articulate all of the violence that can take place there, in acts big and small,
seen and unseen." -- Sarah Rosenthal, Hippocampus
Magazine