Releasing the Animals

'Just as animal rights are one of the most significant issues of our time, so it must be with the literary imagination. With Releasing the Animals, Brooke Biaz takes the lead in fashioning an unforgettable zoo of reversals where Dr. Doolittle would dare not go.' -Stephen Kuusisto, author of Have Dog Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey'One of Brooke Biaz’s best jokes in Releasing the Animals is 'no pun intended.' It’s good precisely because it’s repeated, sparingly and at just the right moments, and because if you like linguistic brio and quirks, riddling, wit, and any form of the shaggy dog story, you are in for a rollick of all of it here, where the human animal is wickedly, punnily confused with those other animals for whom, as ever-spinning PR-man and protagonist Wilson tells us, 'sense and substance are the same thing, [and] opportunity is for the taking.'None of which is to say that this novel is all joke, or even close; rather, its slippages and cracks bring us into an awareness of the permeability of the boundaries-you could say the walls and cage bars-that enclose us all. As we encounter its facts and deadpan apocrypha, its exaggerations, apprehensions, and misapprehensions, we also encounter animals in transformation, including some of the humans; animals who like us are not only sentient but fully themselves in a way that leads us to ask, seriously, about the powers of imagination, stories, and especially relationships in a world in which all our fates are now so visibly intertwined. As the novel itself says, here ’adventure abounds, time means nothing, start and finish coalesce, only the living matters. Only the living!’' -Katharine Coles, author of WaywardAbout Releasing the AnimalsThe City Zoo is failing, and the animals are in trouble. Enter Wilson-to the rescue! When his young marketing company is offered the contract to raise the zoo’s profile, he charges into the fray with all the energy can muster. After all, this is his big chance to boost the company’s fortunes and, at the same time, win the affection of the new zookeeper, Isla. His former college friends and company founders are not so enthusiastic. So Wilson sets out on his own, with his sidekick, the contemplative Crabley, by his side. Convinced some of the Friends of the Zoo are criminals, and their tribe of children are captives, Wilson becomes increasingly concerned for the zoo and its inhabitants. When the penguins are left high and dry, and a dragon lizard escapes, nothing could get worse-but more is to come, as the inhabitants of the butterfly house soon discover. With their lives on the line and a vision of something way beyond the ordinary to guide him, Wilson is finally called on to act.About the AuthorBrooke Biaz (aka Graeme Harper) is Editor-in-Chief of New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing (Routledge). Dean of The Honors College and Professor of Creative Writing at Oakland University, Michigan, and chair of the Creative Writing Studies Organization (CWSO). A Commonwealth Scholar in Creative Writing, his creative and critical works have been widely translated. His awards include the National Book Council Award for New Fiction (Australia) and the NSW Premier’s Writers’ Fellowship, along with those from the British Academy, AHRC, Arts Council of England, BBC, Australia Council, Mutter Library, and NESTA, among others. Previous creative works include The Japanese Cook (2018) The Invention of Dying (2015), Camera Phone (2009) Moon Dance (2008), and Small Maps of the World (2006), all with Parlor Press.