Animal: Notes from a Labyrinth

At times exuberant and at other times dark and haunting, Fishbone's stories delve into the twilight zone of New York's seedy bars and cocaine dens; they reveal the troubled soul of a German expressionist painter; they describe a latter-day "hunger artist" exorcising his own demons; they let us participate in a Venezuelan bacchanal; they explore the tangled lives of sex workers at the margins of society; and they link our contemporary political, social, and personal fixations with the desires and hang-ups of Romans like Catullus and Horace. A work both outrageous and wise, Animal relentlessly probes the human condition in all its glorious and wretched complexity.