How Animals Mate
by Daniel Mueller

A writer reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote, Daniel Mueller has created a collection of stories that are compact, powerful, and uniquely American in style and sensibility. The characters that inhabit Mueller’s stories are all outcasts of different sorts—a struggling poet trying to make ends meet as a stripper; an Aleut girl dissatisfied with life in an Alaskan salmon factory; a disillusioned teen in middle America.

"It takes a brave writer to risk insensitivity for the sake of finding beauty—albeit tainted—in the very places we’d least expect it."
— New York Times Book Review

"None of the stories in How Animals Mate go where we would expect. But as we watch them take their own strange and original routes to their surprising destinations, we realize that Daniel Mueller knows the right way, all along."
— Francine Prose