Bernard Cohen

And the idea of the animal is...

is that they're there in terms of how humans treat animals and regard animals and also the human animal, how we're behaving as a species in a way.

There's two answers to that question.

The first is I put an awful lot of work into the ordering of the book, thinking of it almost as a musical work with a flow and each story connecting to the other and themes being picked up from one story and reappearing in another story.

And the second answer is when I read a book of short stories, I never read it in order.

I open the book.

I try and find the shortest ones so that I can read them while I stand there in the bookshop and then, you know, open at random to different stories and try and get a sense of the style or the styles that go through the book.

I recommend that you start at the beginning and read all the way through in the order.

I hope that they do give a cumulative effect and that they do build on each other.

But also my hope is that the individual stories can stand alone.

Some of them are extremely short, like the shortest is one sentence long.

What's the sentence?

Okay.

So this one's called Parenthood.

Stay out of the puddles, said his father, but one cannot stay out of a place one is already in.

The longest stories are somewhere around the 5,000 word mark.

So, you know, it's not a book of punchlines.

Well, it self-categorises as an in-between book by an in-between writer.

Well, that's the author's last comment on it in the notes at the back.

Well, I think it has it a bit both ways.