Tali Lakshmi Kolluri’s What We Fed to the Manticore is a series of nine short stories written from the perspective of animal narrators who describe inhabiting a world that is changing in the face of human intervention - whether through habitation of land, development of new technologies, or climate change. A core emotional theme that underlies the stories is disorientation as the animals struggle to respond and adapt to a world whose pace of change is ever-accelerating, and and a world in which they struggle to communicate with the responsible co-inhabitants, humans. The theme runs as a common thread throughout the collection without feeling strained - each story has something unique to contribute, and there are no real misses. And while environmentalism is a theme, the stories are tender and evocative without being overly moralizing.

Favorites from this collection included “The Good Donkey” (reflections on grief from a zoo in Gaza), “What We Fed to the Manticore” (a metaphor for climate change), and “May God Forever Bless the Rhino Keepers” (a hound entrusted with protecting rhinos meets its foe), and “The Open Ocean is an Endless Desert” (a new disruption comes to whalesong), though it’s hard to pick favorites since the entire collection is strong - also don’t miss the Author’s Note at the end. This will be one to return to.