Invisible Beasts

(Paperback)

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International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist
Orion Book Award Finalist
O, The Oprah Magazine Title to Pick Up Now

An amazing feat of imagination. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. Its wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original. ANTHONY DOERR, author of All the Light We Cannot See and The Shell Collector

Sophie is an amateur naturalist with a rare genetic gift: the ability to see a marvelous kingdom of invisible, sentient creatures that share a vital relationship with humankind. To record her observations, Sophie creates a personal bestiary and, as she relates the strange abilities of these endangered beings, her tales become extraordinary meditations on love, sex, evolution, extinction, truth, and self-knowledge.

In the tradition of E.O. Wilsons Anthill, Invisible Beasts is inspiring, philosophical, and richly detailed fiction grounded by scientific fact and a profound insight into nature. The fantastic creations within its pagesan ancient animal that uses natural cold fusion for energy, a species of vampire bat that can hear when their human host is lying, a continent-sized sponge living under the ice of Antarcticailluminate the role that all living creatures play in the environment and remind us of what we stand to lose if we fail to recognize our entwined destinies.

Sharona Muir is the author of The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Fathers Lives. The recipient of a Hodder Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, her writing has appeared in Granta, Orion magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and English at Bowling Green State University. Invisible Beasts is her first novel.

Reviews

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist Orion Book Award Finalist O, The Oprah Magazine Title to Pick Up Now BuzzFeed Book To Dive Into Brooklyn Book Festival Most Impressive Debut Novelist Kenyon Review Holiday Reading Recommendation Publishers Weekly First Fiction & Book of the Week selection Library Journal Top Indie Fiction selection This environmental fableas if Where the Wild Things Are had been written by Rachel Carsonis a lyrical field guide . . . as well as a commentary on extinction and being alive. O, The Oprah Magazine Muir astounded this reader. Liltingly physical, metaphorically sound, elusively knowing, her language is paint and clay and vibration. International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist citation, Hartford Public Library [An] imaginative menagerie comes to life in [Muirs] novel Invisible Beasts. Sentinel-Tribune Wonderful and unusual. Orion Magazine Vividly portrayed. Locus A wild and woolly hybrid that refreshingly defies classification. . . . Compelling throughout . . . its the literary lovechild of Lewis Carroll and Rachel Carson filtered through the lens of zoologys godfather, Darwin himself. Bostonia An imaginative, delightful field guide to animals that seem to be visible to only a few peopleincluding amateur naturalist and narrator Sophie. As her detailed descriptions of the fantastic creatures unfold, Sophie reveals a bit about human nature. Stanford Magazine At once a celebration of the power of imagination and a requiem for the species were losing every day. Both moving and often surprisingly funny, its a seductive work of speculative naturalism that has its hands in the dirt and its head in the clouds. Kenyon Review Brilliant. . . . With a light, witty, but heartwrenching touch, without preaching or hectoring in any form, Muir reveals, through the stories of her magnificent, funny, endearing invisible animals and their perils and extinctions, the anthropocentric obtuseness and mindless, casual as well as purposeful devastation of the environment and the mass slaughter of life forms, including ourselves, that puts all of usanimals, vegetables, and mineralsin dire peril. Womens Review of Books Sensitive and elegant . . . funny and tender. . . . Beasts, a category used here in all its expansiveness, includes everything from the human to the microbe. This book is a wondrous testament to those relationships, interdependencies, and affinities. Invisible Beasts makes the bestiary a document of profoundly human dimensions, and offers to all readers, whether devotees of science or of fantasy, very real pleasures. io9 An absolute delight. . . . This smart, whimsical novel takes readers not only into a world of invisible beasts but into the mind of a charmingly quirky character. EcoLit Books An erudite guidebook to the animals that walk unseen among us. LitReactor Full of language that is at once passionate and precise, flowery and full of information, [Invisible Beasts] is bursting at the seams with a strange duality, a dizzying mash-up of romanticism and science. Collagist Lines blur between the human and animal worlds in this richly detailed debut. . . . In Sophies struggles to find her footing in a world only she and a few others can see, Muir expertly pinpoints the frailty of the human condition. This is an amazing feat of imagination. Publishers Weekly (starred review) Playfully and thoughtfully underlines the pain and loss of extinction . . . combin[ing] fact and imagination in 20 fables narrated by an amateur naturalist. . . . A marvelous capsule of natural history . . . not to mention crackling suspense. Kirkus Reviews The various fantastical beings presented here are described in careful scientific detail with results that are weird, whimsical, and somewhat unsettling. Like very fractured Just So Stories. Library Journal Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. Its wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original. ANTHONY DOERR, author of All the Light We Cannot See and The Shell Collector In this twenty-first century, theres no one like Sharona Muir who can write, in bright accurate language, animals real or imaginary in an updated bestiary that riffs on evolution, extinction, and what it means to be human among other species. We need this view, and youll be right there with her on every page of Invisible Beasts. JOHN FELSTINER, author of Can Poetry Save the Earth: A Field Guide to Nature Poems Invisible Beasts is a delightful and stunning feat of environmental imagination, endlessly enjoyable and fascinating. With the deep inventiveness of Ursula Le Guin and the quirky vitality of Annie Dillard, Sharona Muir seduces us into a cautionary world full of creatures, at once fanciful and utterly convincing, who hold unexpected lessons for ourselves. ROBERT FINCH, author of A Cape Cod Notebook and co-editor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing Many writers are inspired by symbiologythe interdependence of nature, culture, and technologybut Muirs intelligence and breadth of knowledge are exceptional. You could not find a better little book of ethics, politics, and ecology for our time. REGENIA GAGNIER, author of The Insatiability of Human Wants and Individualism, Decadence and Globalization If youve lost your capacity to wonder at the myriad forms of life swarming, burrowing, swooping, and gamboling around youand inside youthen look no further. Equal parts science and imagination, Invisible Beasts takes us on a journey to another world that turns out to be our world, as if seen and experienced for the first time. If youre interested in what it means to be alive, and share life, then read this book. CARY WOLFE, author of Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame and What is Posthumanism
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist Orion Book Award Finalist O, The Oprah Magazine Title to Pick Up Now BuzzFeed Book To Dive Into Brooklyn Book Festival Most Impressive Debut Novelist Kenyon Review Holiday Reading Recommendation Publishers Weekly First Fiction & Book of the Week selection Library Journal Top Indie Fiction selection This environmental fableas if Where the Wild Things Are had been written by Rachel Carsonis a lyrical field guide . . . as well as a commentary on extinction and being alive. O, The Oprah Magazine Muir astounded this reader. Liltingly physical, metaphorically sound, elusively knowing, her language is paint and clay and vibration. International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist citation, Hartford Public Library [An] imaginative menagerie comes to life in [Muirs] novel Invisible Beasts. Sentinel-Tribune Wonderful and unusual. Orion Magazine Vividly portrayed. Locus A wild and woolly hybrid that refreshingly defies classification. . . . Compelling throughout . . . its the literary lovechild of Lewis Carroll and Rachel Carson filtered through the lens of zoologys godfather, Darwin himself. Bostonia An imaginative, delightful field guide to animals that seem to be visible to only a few peopleincluding amateur naturalist and narrator Sophie. As her detailed descriptions of the fantastic creatures unfold, Sophie reveals a bit about human nature. Stanford Magazine At once a celebration of the power of imagination and a requiem for the species were losing every day. Both moving and often surprisingly funny, its a seductive work of speculative naturalism that has its hands in the dirt and its head in the clouds. Kenyon Review Brilliant. . . . With a light, witty, but heartwrenching touch, without preaching or hectoring in any form, Muir reveals, through the stories of her magnificent, funny, endearing invisible animals and their perils and extinctions, the anthropocentric obtuseness and mindless, casual as well as purposeful devastation of the environment and the mass slaughter of life forms, including ourselves, that puts all of usanimals, vegetables, and mineralsin dire peril. Womens Review of Books Sensitive and elegant . . . funny and tender. . . . Beasts, a category used here in all its expansiveness, includes everything from the human to the microbe. This book is a wondrous testament to those relationships, interdependencies, and affinities. Invisible Beasts makes the bestiary a document of profoundly human dimensions, and offers to all readers, whether devotees of science or of fantasy, very real pleasures. io9 An absolute delight. . . . This smart, whimsical novel takes readers not only into a world of `invisible beasts but into the mind of a charmingly quirky character. EcoLit Books An erudite guidebook to the `animals that walk unseen among us. LitReactor Full of language that is at once passionate and precise, flowery and full of information, [Invisible Beasts] is bursting at the seams with a strange duality, a dizzying mash-up of romanticism and science. Collagist Lines blur between the human and animal worlds in this richly detailed debut. . . . In Sophies struggles to find her footing in a world only she and a few others can see, Muir expertly pinpoints the frailty of the human condition. This is an amazing feat of imagination. Publishers Weekly (starred review) Playfully and thoughtfully underlines the pain and loss of extinction . . . combin[ing] fact and imagination in 20 fables narrated by an amateur naturalist. . . . A marvelous capsule of natural history . . . not to mention crackling suspense. Kirkus Reviews The various fantastical beings presented here are described in careful scientific detail with results that are weird, whimsical, and somewhat unsettling. Like very fractured Just So Stories. Library Journal Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. Its wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original. ANTHONY DOERR, author of All the Light We Cannot See and The Shell Collector In this twenty-first century, theres no one like Sharona Muir who can write, in bright accurate language, animals real or imaginary in an updated bestiary that riffs on evolution, extinction, and what it means to be human among other species. We need this view, and youll be right there with her on every page of Invisible Beasts. JOHN FELSTINER, author of Can Poetry Save the Earth: A Field Guide to Nature Poems Invisible Beasts is a delightful and stunning feat of environmental imagination, endlessly enjoyable and fascinating. With the deep inventiveness of Ursula Le Guin and the quirky vitality of Annie Dillard, Sharona Muir seduces us into a cautionary world full of creatures, at once fanciful and utterly convincing, who hold unexpected lessons for ourselves. ROBERT FINCH, author of A Cape Cod Notebook and co-editor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing Many writers are inspired by symbiologythe interdependence of nature, culture, and technologybut Muirs intelligence and breadth of knowledge are exceptional. You could not find a better little book of ethics, politics, and ecology for our time. REGENIA GAGNIER, author of The Insatiability of Human Wants and Individualism, Decadence and Globalization If youve lost your capacity to wonder at the myriad forms of life swarming, burrowing, swooping, and gamboling around youand inside youthen look no further. Equal parts science and imagination, Invisible Beasts takes us on a journey to another world that turns out to be our world, as if seen and experienced for the first time. If youre interested in what it means to be alive, and share life, then read this book. CARY WOLFE, author of Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame and What is Posthumanism

Author Bio

Sharona Muir is the author of "The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father's Lives, " a collection of poetry, a collection of literary criticism, and the novel "Invisible Beasts" (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in 2014). Her writing has appeared in "Granta, Orion" magazine, "Virginia Quarterly Review, Paris Review, " and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University; two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships; the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellowship; the Bernard F. Connors Prize, and other awards. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing and English at Bowling Green State University.