Animalia Paradoxa by Henrietta Rose-Innes

13 Jun 2019
Animalia Paradoxa by Henrietta Rose-Innes

Animalia Paradoxa: the taxonomic category created by Carl Linnaeus for mythical, dubious and imaginary animals.

A virus inflames a woman with mortal desire; a colonial naturalist seeks an impossible specimen; invisible violence stalks a safari and a man out walking enters into a strange shadow dance with a prizefighter. Ranging from taut human drama to phantasmagoria, these stories make rich and strange connections – between ancient and new, human and animal, Africa and Europe, reality and dream.

Taken together, in prose of great precision and beauty, the stories in Animalia Paradoxa map the complexities of the human specimen, in all its troubling glory. This is fiction of the highest quality, from one of South Africa’s foremost novelists.

First published in 2019 in the UK by Boiler House Press.

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