Bestiary

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I enjoyed On Earth we are briefly gorgeous which is overly lyrical and still establishes a good connection). The stories popularized through the bestiary continued to influence natural history texts and images well into the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, I was unable to finish the book and made it about of a quarter into it before I had to stop.

It’s as if you found yourself imagining the stories you might have overheard of past family members you never got to meet. If I can compare this book to anything, it felt similar in voice to The Discomfort of Evening(which just won the International Booker so that's no light praise) because of the world of the children but the story has more complexity due to the multiple generations and the Hu Gu Po (tiger spirit). She rinsed the dishes so bright we had to squint while eating; she sang to a knife as if auditioning to be its blade. Bestiaries influenced early heraldry in the Middle Ages, giving ideas for charges and also for the artistic form.Medieval bestiaries contained detailed descriptions and illustrations of species native to Western Europe, exotic animals and what in modern times are considered to be imaginary animals. She is the author of the debut novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In modern times, artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Saul Steinberg have produced their own bestiaries.

The character development was limited, and it often felt like a string of disconnected events cobbled together into an incoherent narrative. Lurking in the middle of this powerful and multifaceted collection is a wrenching sequence that wonders just who or what is the real monster inside this life of survival and reflection. For example, the pelican, which was believed to tear open its breast to bring its young to life with its own blood, was a living representation of Jesus. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother's letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies an old Taiwanese myth, and fears the power of the tiger spirit bristling within her to cause pain.Tracing one family's history from Taiwan to America, Bestiary is a lyrical and electrifying novel of migration, queer lineages and girlhood. Chang has a way of describing the forces of attraction which seem like a new language, written in the lover's bones. Throughout it all, the lyrical serenity of the prose feels at odds with the unflinching violence that it captures—it’s discomfiting. She is the author of the novel Bestiary , which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

As the two young lovers translate the grandmother's letters and the myths that surround them, Daughter must reckon with how deep these stories are buried within her, and what power is rising, violently, through her. Epic and intimate at once, BESTIARY brings myth to visceral life, showing what becomes of women and girls who carry tigers, birds, and fish within. I don’t see footnoting incorporated into fictional narratives quite like it was used here and it was amazing! Filled with myth and allusion, in sentences crackling with lyric inventiveness, Chang explores three generations of Taiwanese-Americans, using the imagery of muck and filth to expose the unacknowledged beauty in otherness (trust me, it works).It is marketed as a mythological, magical realist novel following a Taiwanese-American family’s queer history with a particular focus on its women. The bestiary in the Queen Mary Psalter is found in the "marginal" decorations that occupy about the bottom quarter of the page, and are unusually extensive and coherent in this work. The aim of the stories and illuminations was not to impart factual information or visual accuracy but rather to convey the wonder, variety, or hidden meaning found in the natural world. There is something disgustingly magical about this book and it in my bookshelf so I can savor things properly.