Nine titles told from the perspective of animal protagonists

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a mixed South Asian American writer from Northern California. Her debut collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore, is now out from Tin House. Her short fiction has been published in the minnesota review, Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, and The Common.

A lifelong Californian, Kolluri lives in the Central Valley with her husband, a teacher and printmaker, and a very skittish cat named Fig.

At Electric Lit she tagged nine books that feature animals as prominent characters. One title on the list:

The Story of a Goat by Perumal Murugan, translated by N Kalyan Raman

In South India, in a dry year, an old farmer sits to gaze at a sunset after harvest, when a giant approaches and offers him a black goat. “Only a kind-hearted man can have my baby,” says the giant, offering this seventh, and smallest, goat of a litter. Placing the goat in the old man’s hand, “[a]t first, it felt as if a hammer had grazed his hand; the next moment, he found a flower in his palm.” The farmer brings the baby goat – the kid – home to his wife, who names her Poonachi. So begins The Story of a Goat. What follows is a sweeping story about agrarian life in South India, encompassing examinations of caste oppression and colorism, and the impact of government regulation on villagers, all woven together with Poonachi’s life as a goat. And we don’t see Poonachi as merely a marginal animal flitting in and out of human lives. Rather, her loves, her hopes, and her connections are treated with the same richness as her human companions. I found myself deeply invested in Poonachi and the family that raised her, and I loved in particular how this novel was written so that all of their lives were intimately intertwined. In the end, I saw Poonachi clearly as the treasure she always was.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue