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Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the sixteen essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalised by humans. Here are the starling that inspired Mozart with its song, Darwin´s tortoise Harriet, and in an extraordinary essay, Jumbo the elephant (and how they tried to electrocute him). Modelled loosely on a medieval bestiary, these witty , playful, provocative essays traverse history, myth, science and more, introducing a stunning new writer to British readers.

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"I´ve spent decades reading books on the roles animals play in human cultures, but none have ever made me think, and feel, as much as this one. It´s a devastating meditation on our relationship to the natural world. It might be the best book on animals I´ve ever read. It´s also the only one that´s made me laugh out loud." Helen Macdonald New York Times Book Review

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Elena Passarello is an actor, writer and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Fellowship in non-fiction. Her first collection of essays, Let Me Clear My Throat, won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards. Her essays on performance, pop culture and the natural world have appeared in Oxford American, Slate, Creative Nonfiction and the Iowa Review. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon.

@elenavox

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