Eight of the best non-human narrators in fiction

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her most recent books include the national best-seller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (2017) and The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte (2018). Her new novel, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, is based on a true story of the Great War.

At Lit Hub, Rooney tagged eight books that "send messages and promises to their readers that, far from standing outside of so-called 'nature,' humans are animals too." One title on the list:

Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8
(Graywolf Press)

A comic and unapologetically political indictment of factory farming, Deb Olin Unferth’s 2020 novel Barn 8 also rotates among various points of view, among them those of the hens at the heart of the heist being plotted by the book’s activists. The two main human characters—Janey and Cleveland, industry egg auditors—plan to liberate almost one million chickens from an atrocious egg farm. In an interview, Unferth explained that “I always wanted a sort of Cubist portrait of what was happening. I wanted many points of view, perspectives, voices, all looking at and talking about this one event: all the hens leaving that farm.” The almost overwhelming, cacophonous heterogeneity of the narration—including a particularly winsome chicken called Bwwaauk—results in a book that achieves Unferth’s aim of causing the reader to expand their taxonomies of personhood: who and what we are willing to grant subjectivity and why.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue