Lauren Acampora is the author of
The Animal Room,
The Hundred Waters,
The Paper Wasp, and
The Wonder Garden.
Her work has won or been nominated for the GLCA New Writers Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Story Prize, and the New England Book Award, and she’s been named an Artist Fellow in Fiction by The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has appeared in publications such as
The Paris Review,
One Story, and
The New York Times Book Review and has been anthologized in
The Best American Short Stories.
At Lit Hub the author tagged "seven standout works of fiction that illuminate the inextricable links we share with our animal compatriots." One title on the list:
Lydia Millet, Love in Infant Monkeys
Madonna hunts pheasant in the English countryside, Thomas Edison electrocutes an elephant, Harry Harlow conducts callous experiments on monkeys, and Jimmy Carter fends off a swamp rabbit attack. Millet’s collection of tight and unsettling short 
stories operates through the conceit of fictionalized true tales about famous people and the animals associated with them. At times comical, each of these stories swerves and plunges deep into dark truths of human nature. Here, animals serve as vessels for our worst impulses, suffering at the point where curiosity turns to sadism, domination to cruelty, and self-interest to neglect. In the brilliant story “Sir Henry,” a dedicated dogwalker to the stars remarks, “Dogs were the martyrs of the human race.” And yet, while the animals in these stories are sacrificed to selfish purpose and whim, the human characters are astonished and haunted by them. Like Thomas Edison’s electrocuted elephant, they glow like saints, symbols of innocence and divinity, embodying the impossibility of human perfection and the original sin of our nature. As the guilt-ridden Edison imagines of his executed elephant: “I hear you. You say: I do not forgive. You say: this is my gift to you. I will never forgive.”
Read about
the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.
--Marshal Zeringue
Her work has won or been nominated for the GLCA New Writers Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Story Prize, and the New England Book Award, and she’s been named an Artist Fellow in Fiction by The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, One Story, and The New York Times Book Review and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories.
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