cover image No Animals We Could Name

No Animals We Could Name

Ted Sanders. Graywolf, $15 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-1-55597-616-3

In Sanders’s formally rigorous debut collection, winner of the 2011 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize for fiction, characters have relationships with a variety of animals—domestic, wild, and even imaginary. In “Obit” (which won a PEN/O. Henry Award), the author splits the text into columns to tell dueling stories. “Flounder,” the story of a man and a fish, is told from perspectives of both predator and prey. A character builds an array of machines, including a simulacrum of himself, in “Assembly,” which Sanders lays out on the page like a poem. The book’s centerpiece is the disturbing three-part “Airbag,” about a party that leaves three guests—the lovelorn David, a huge dog named Lord Jim, and Dorlene, the seventh shortest person on record—significantly altered by the end of the night. The collection’s variations—in both content and form—mean that not every story will work for every reader (more conventional stories deliver the clearest emotional impact), but all 12 are memorable, and such a broad range in a story collection is welcome. (July)