City Beasts: Fourteen Short Stories of Uninvited Wildlife

Description

In these stories, Mark Kurlansky journeys to his familiar haunts like New York's Central Park or Miami's Little Havana but with an original, earthy and adventurous perspective. From baseball players in the Dominican Republic to Basque separatists in Spain to a restaurant owner in Cuba, from urban coyotes to a murder of crows, Kurlansky travels the worlds of animals and their human counterparts, revealing moving and hilarious truths about our connected existence. In the end, he illuminates how closely our worlds are aligned, how humans really are beasts.

Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times-bestselling author of many books, including Cod, Salt, 1968- The Year That Rocked the World, The Big Oyster, The Last Fish Tale, The Food of a Younger Land, The Eastern Stars, Ready for a Brand New Beat, and the short story collection, Edible Stories. He lives in New York City.

Praise for Mark Kurlansky "Mark Kurlansky's fiction provides the same pleasures we have come to expect from his nonfiction. It's beautifully written, observant, and acutely intelligent." - Francine Prose "Richly imagined stories." -O, the Oprah Magazine "Brilliant... Journalistic skills might be part of a writer's survival kit, but they infrequently prove to be the foundation for literary success, as they have here. .... Kurlansky has a wonderful ear for the syntax and rhythm of the vernacular... For all the seriousness of Kurlansky's cultural entanglements, it is nevertheless a delight to experience his sophisticated sense of play and, at times, his outright wicked sense of humor." -The New York Times Book Review "For those of us who love both stories and food, this book is a delectable feast. Mark Kurlansky's sixteen-part novel is like a long, wonderful meal with friends. It is nurturing, succulent, and most of all, a lot of fun." - Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I'm Dying and Claire of the Sea Light "Kurlansky powerfully demonstrates the defining role food plays in history and culture." -Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Kurlansky continues to prove himself remarkably adept as taking a most unlikely candidate and telling its tale with epic grandeur." -Los Angeles Times Book Review "Kurlansky has a keen eye for odd facts and natural detail." -Wall Street Journal