AustLit

'Animal Dreams collects David Brooks’ thought-provoking essays about how humans think, dream and write about other species. Brooks examines how animals have featured in Australian and international literature and culture, from ‘The Man from Snowy River’ to Rainer Maria Rilke and The Turin Horse, to live-animal exports, veganism, and the culling of native and non-native species. In his piercing, elegant, widely celebrated style, he considers how private and public conversations about animals reflect older and deeper attitudes to our own and other species, and what questions we must ask to move these conversations forward, in what he calls ‘the immense work of undoing’.

'For readers interested in animal welfare, conservation, and the relationship between humans and other species, Animal Dreams will be an essential, richly rewarding companion.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'The Grass Library is a philosophical and poetic journey that recounts the author’s relationship with his four sheep and other animals in his home in the Blue Mountains. It is both a memoir and an elegy for animal rights.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

 (Publication abstract)

'An old Captain of Cavalry, back in the days when the Cavalry was of any importance at all, retired to the Crimea, to a large house outside of Theodosia. A man with a fascination for orchids. Old, that is to say, at the time of the events I'm about to relate, though he wasn't when he came. Retired in his forties, in fact, and had been there twenty-five years or so, slowly 'going to seed', as the saying goes, if by that one can be taken to mean not shaving every day, not always fastening all the buttons of one's fly, eating only when one finds oneself hungry, and taking as scant regard for the dates and days of the week as for the hours on the clockface, although it must also be said that he did, for the first twenty years of his residence, have a housekeeper, chosen deliberately for her advanced age, slowness of movement, and general disregard for instructions and conversation. She might almost have been a ghost...' (Publication abstract)

"The Loaded Cat" offers a renewed and careful analysis of Derrida's encounter with his cat as a philosophical problem: an Oedipal riddle punctuated by castration anxiety, human-animal hybridity (the Sphinx), and the imprecisions of language. The cat, according to Brooks's interpretation of Derrida's lecture, is "loaded" with linguistic signifiers and literary allusions, making it difficult for us to truly see the cat not as a figure or metaphor but as a real animal being, "loaded with herself, her suffering, the weight and intensity of her own existence." ' (Introduction xvi)