From a polar bear hunting in the barren Arctic to a hound in Africa guarding rhinos from poachers, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri brings readers inside the minds of the creatures with whom we share our world. Her poignant collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore, spans both species and the globe. The tone of the stories ranges from tragic to hopeful, with the majority leaning toward melancholy.

The through-line tying all the stories together is the relationship between the animal narrators and the humans they encounter. Readers are reintroduced to familiar concepts such as war, zoos, poachers and puppets from a perspective that makes such things new and strange. On a wider level, the stories explore the relationship between humanity and the natural world, placing us both as an integral part of and foreign to the rest of the animal kingdom. Even in stories where individual ...