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From the award-winning author of The Wonder Garden comes a set of linked stories spotlighting human-animal relations—and revealing the tensions that threaten to fracture a suburban New England community.
Tensions simmer in small-town Connecticut. A city transplant is haunted by the deer carcass hanging in her neighbor's garage. A psychiatric patient believes she's becoming a bird. A disgraced oil executive invites his granddaughter's kindergarten class to tour his home menagerie—what could go wrong? Rumors spread and fires burn in this second short story collection from award-winning author Lauren Acampora.
As in Acampora's debut The Wonder Garden, The Animal Room delves deep into the town of Old Cranbury and its eclectic mix of residents. Incisive and moving, these stories chart the interconnected lives of neighbors, relatives, coworkers, enemies, lovers, and the animals around them, turning an unflinching eye to the natural world to shed light on human nature. Through its riveting ensemble, The Animal Room paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of contemporary American life that is strikingly unique.
"Acampora reminds her readers that humans are never far removed from their wild roots ... Fans of Karen Russell's short fiction and readers who enjoyed the suburban drama of Tom Perrotta's Little Children (2004), Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere (2017), or the tight-knit community explored in Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge (2008) will savor Acampora's latest. Wielding scalpel-sharp wit and a cool aloofness, Acampora brings her unique perspective on the American suburb to The Animal Room." —Booklist (starred review)
"Acampora imagines a small town and its memorably conflicted inhabitants as indelibly as Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge stories and as intricately woven as Jennifer Egan's "Goon Squad" cycle." —Library Journal (starred review)
"This skillful collection contains more than a few gems." —Publishers Weekly
"[T]he social commentary of this collection doesn't land as successfully as in her older work, which navigates the political and the uncanny with more nuance and depth. An uneven collection with the occasional gem." —Kirkus Reviews
"Transcendent. In this dazzling panoply of intersecting lives and stories, Acampora explores our relationship to the animal in all its forms and throws into profound relief our great and tragic humanity. A marvelous feat of imagination and empathy." —Mona Awad, author of Bunny
"The Animal Room is an epic novel cut into sections and scattered along a trail for readers to gather up. It appears initially to be a collection of stories about the connections between humans and animals. Each story, however, proves to be part of an intricately-realized overstory of remarkable scope and depth. Every life, every being, from the rescue dog to its rescuers, proves to be interrelated in ways only the writer, and the reader, are able to see. It's a stunning accomplishment." —Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours
"Piercing and unsettling, the stories in The Animal Room stalk through small-town Connecticut—the wild pressing against fences and windows, the feral lurking beneath the neighborly. With precision and dark wit, Acampora exposes a community where class tensions and primal instincts coil in uneasy proximity: the civilized veneer has always been thin here, and something is scratching at it from both sides. These sentences are tensile and gleaming—Acampora is a major talent." —Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe
This information about The Animal Room was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lauren Acampora's fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and Antioch Review. Raised in Connecticut, she now lives in Westchester County, New York, with her husband, artist Thomas Doyle, and their daughter.
Author Interview
Link to Lauren Acampora's Website
Name Pronunciation
Lauren Acampora: ah-come-POUR-uh
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