A radically uninhibited book that delves deeply into the muck and glory of life, confronting the enduring perplexities of love, art, and the human bondage to pleasure.

At times exuberant and at other times dark and haunting, Fishbone’s stories explore the twilight zone of New York’s seedy bars and cocaine dens, reveal the troubled soul of a German expressionist painter, describe a latter-day “hunger artist” exorcising his own demons, confront the tangled lives of sex workers at the margins of society, and link our contemporary political, social, and personal fixations with the desires, anxieties, and hang-ups of Romans like Catullus and Horace. A work both outrageous and wise, Animal relentlessly probes the human condition in all its wretched and enthralling complexity.