Nine queer titles in which animals take on a mythical importance

Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer. His research has been published in leading scientific journals including Cell, PNAS, and most recently, Nature Communications. His writing has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His previous book Virology was a finalist for the NBCC and Lambda Literary Awards in Nonfiction. His latest book is Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood.

At Electric Lit Osmundson tagged nine "books by queer writers [in which] animals play an essential, mythical role, inextricable from the narrator or the story." One entry on the list:

How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler

Ever curious and endlessly probing, Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches is a memoir told through close examination of sea creatures: gold fish, octopus, sturgeon, bobbitt worm. Through telling these stories of the natural world, Imbler is able to narrate their childhood, their life, the forces that invariably shape us, so many of which are out of our control. Imbler’s writing about animal life is tender, intimate. “Imagine you are something like a snail . . . You are not a fast swimmer, but you make do, bobbing around the blue and sealing off your body in spiraled chambers that buoy you up and down the water column.” I can feel myself move with the water. In a recent interview for Orion Magazine, Imbler explained, “I found it far easier to find empathy and tenderness for animals like fish than I did with former versions of myself.” This reaching outward, toward animals, to find love for our own queer selves, given a world that constructs disgust around our touch and identities, undergirds all these books. Given how cruel humans can be, indeed are, to queer and trans people, it is no wonder we give voice and witness to other creatures—a fox, a fish—that we yearn for their protection.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue