Animal: Notes from a Labyrinth

by Alan Fishbone

This radically uninhibited book delves deeply into the muck and glory of life, tackling the enduring perplexities of love, art, identity, and our 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; they reveal the troubled soul of a German expressionist painter; they describe a latter-day "hunger artist” exorcising his own demon; they let us participate in a Venezuelan bacchanal; they confront the tangled lives of sex workers at the margins of society; and they 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 glorious complexity.

144 pages, Hardcover

Published April 22, 2025

Reviews

[Allison]

This is a powerful, well written book, but not for me. Either it was written for its shock value, or the author inhabits a different world than mine.

I did find the chapter on Catullus interesting. I began my studies at Brown University as a classics major and had a semester’s course on Catullus in Latin. Now, this was back in the early 1960’s before drugs and activism ripped open the fabric of society. I do remember the poet thumbed his nose at society, but my Latin-English dictionary must not have included the vernacular of Catullus’s society because I think I would have remembered the raw nature of his poetry if it had been spelled out to us. Impressionable college students don’t forget stuff like that. It sure contradicts the belief that Latin is a dead language!

So in conclusion, if you like your essays raw and sexually charged, give this a try.

For those of us preferring subtlety, I suggest you keep looking.

[Georgina Reads_Eats_Explores]

This is one of those books that’s much easier to experience than explain.

At under 150 pages, it’s a surprisingly absorbing read, though “pretty” is probably the last word I’d use for it. Fishbone writes with an unflinching honesty, moving between love, addiction, grief, sex, art and travel with a style that constantly shifts beneath your feet.

The book begins with something as ordinary as a coffee stain and ends with the accidental ending of a book. Between those moments, stories echo one another rather than follow a straight line. A painter’s tragedy mirrors the author’s own. Loss, childlessness, cocaine, history, politics and ancient Rome all find unexpected ways to speak to each other. Rather than driving the narrative forwards, these parallels deepen it, asking readers to sit with uncomfortable questions about who we are and why we make the choices we do.

Part novel, part essay, part travelogue and part love letter, Animal feels like an invitation to examine your own life as much as the author’s. At times it’s crude, confronting and difficult to read. At others it’s thoughtful, tender and surprisingly moving.

Fishbone’s writing is ambitious and unapologetically experimental. It won’t be for everyone, but there’s something admirable about a writer willing to take that kind of risk. Somehow, despite all the chaos, it hangs together.

A challenging, intelligent and deeply unconventional read.

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy. Opinions, as always, are my own.

[Kevin Joseph]

I didn't know what to expect from this book by Alan Fishbone when it was selected by a book club I participate in, but I ended up enjoying it immensely. Written in the first person by a narrator with the same first name as the author, it reads like a personal journal in which someone recorded their deepest, darkest thoughts without any expectation they would ever be read. The chapters alternate between darkly humorous ancedotes about Alan's somewhat aimless adventures in Europe as an aspiring novelist and deep philosophical ruminations on what it means to be human. If you read carefully, you'll see that everything ties together and contributes to his theme about the duality of humanity. On one hand, we are all animals, driven by the messy desires to survive, propagate, and pursue hedonistic pleasures, while on the other, we crave supernal ideals found in philosophy and art. Alan invites us to trudge with him through the mud, where messy humans seek to reconcile their divided nature. For such a short book, it left an oversized impression on me, and I'd love to see Fishbone take a crack at a novel that explores these themes more fully.

[lacroixreads]

I went into this book not realizing it was semi autobiographical, and that’s completely my fault, but at the same time, i feel like i may have DNFed this one if i had actually been aware of that going in. The stories seemed interesting enough at first, but i slowly started to become disinterested. I thought the writing was very good, beautiful even, but sometimes the sentence structure and certain vernacular can come across in a more pretentious way than i think it was originally intended. i feel like to make this narrative really shine, a more casual way of speaking could make the story feel more relatable. I thought the collection was put together well, and the structure of the story itself was solid and i enjoyed it. I would recommend this if you like raw slice of life stories with little plot line.

[John Julius]

I'm giving this book five stars because it's lean, learned, funny, and raw all at the same time, but most of all because it's unabashedly written for hopped-up heterosexual males with wanderlust, and who are out to fearlessly find themselves. Books like this rarely get published anymore. I reviewed it with three other Heresy Press novels here: https://youtu.be/dg2ioasAIZk
My comments about Animal begin at 12:11.