A review by lizawall
Large Animals by Jess Arndt

5.0

there's this kind of overblown awkward/itchy/inherently uncomfortable with being alive narrator that i associate with some 19th c ppl i dunno like dostoevsky's underground man or some gogol or like some french guys too and then again a mid-20th c donald barthelme type thing that has just recently been revived in a particular timely/queer way, and i really got that in these stories! god i love that amy sillman cover and honestly the acknowledgments were just like a collective of all my favorite people. i really felt for these narrators, and their extreme desire to connect combined with maybe even more extreme revulsion and fear of connecting. there was a kind of pervasive body hatred/horror that sometimes spilled over into feeling actually misogynistic to me in a way i couldn't quite put my finger on? but honestly i think that feeling was just misreading on my part and something that might be fruitful for me to revisit because there was also a kind of overall narrative empathy or gentleness even holding these self-shaming narrators.