Conversations with Extinct Animals - by Patrick Lawler (Paperback)

About the Book

In this genre-defying novel, Patrick Lawler crafts a kaleidoscopic dialogue between twenty-four extinct animals and the humans haunted by their absence. Blending eco-fiction, psychological inquiry, and lyrical storytelling, the book unfolds as a surreal therapy session, a love letter, and a suicide note--field notes from the edge of extinction that ask what it means to live, remember, and tell stories in a world unraveling.

Book Synopsis

An experimental narrative by eco-fiction author and poet Patrick Lawler evolves out of the interactions between twenty-four extinct animals and those characters who struggle for significance in the face of their own extinction.

Patrick Lawler's second novel, Conversations with Extinct Animal, is a dialogue between psychology and ecology--between poetry and story. A suicide note masquerading as a love letter, the novel transcends genres and keeps kaleidoscopically shifting: sometimes it is an elegy, and sometimes it is a therapy session--but always these are the field notes for the end of the world.

As a collection of characters associated with The Facility come to terms with an individual's death, they must confront their own losses amid the colossal absence of the twenty-four extinct animals. All the characters float between various inexplicable, mystifying "syndromes" that call into question their identities and, ultimately, call into question the elements of story itself. "Looking at pictures of the Extinct Animals, I can't help but wonder if it is too late to save the world--especially since there are so many different worlds," observes the narrator of the novel in his efforts to save the unsavable.

Review Quotes

"In Conversations with Extinct Animals, Patrick Lawler takes us with him into the Facility where nothing is facile (except the flight of his language), but everything fascinates. I love this book. Of all Lawler's books it is the most poetic, the saddest, the most painfully beautiful. I love the sadness." --Kirsten Kaschock, author of Sleight

"Near the end of Conversations with Extinct Animals, Patrick Lawler's narrator - obsessed with the suicide of his friend Zach - gives us 'only two options: either we die or we tell stories.' Lawler's choice: he tells stories. Each sentence in this enchanted, poignant, hilarious, genre-bending novel is a story. And these stories take you on journeys: to 'the angry dark message, ' to 'spoonfuls of light, ' to a place 'gray like melancholia, ' and also to 'the stunning craziness of God.' So, buckle up, toss the compass, ditch expectations: you're going on a wild ride!" --David Lloyd, author of Over the Line and The Moving of the Water.

"Patrick Lawler has been writing some of the most interesting fiction in America for the last thirty years and his newest book is no exception. Conversations with Extinct Animals is one of the most inventive and wildly interesting books you'll read this year. It is like Richard Brautigan and David Lynch did LSD. Then LSD did them." --Corey Zeller, coauthor of There is Only One Ghost in the World

"Patrick Lawler's brilliant and timely new novel is Conversation With Extinct Animals, which slyly invites and eludes ideas of what is real. The story is told by an unreliable narrator who admits, "In my dream I am erased." In an oddly humorous twist, the extinct animals are further removed from reality by being sketches in a cryptic place called The Facility. Demonstrating his unique poetic sensibility, and the inclusion of actual poems, Lawler keeps the search for what's real both entertaining and intensely introspective." --Mary McLaughlin Slechta, author of Mulberry Street Stories

"Patrick Lawler's compact book of precise prose (and poetry) fairly bursts with ironies and revelations. The narrator of Conversations with Extinct Animals lives with a few other "characters" in the Facility, which may be a mental institution or may be the world. He looks at the images of extinct animals--toolache wallaby, Socorro dove, et al.--on the walls and contemplates dualities: life/death, reality/dream, truth/lies, etc. What he comes up with is a Pointillist picture of the world as it once was, as it is, and as it may very possibly become."
--Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Safe Colors

About the Author