Rabbit Island

Award-winning writer Elvira Navarro's stories are psychogeographies of dingy hotel rooms, shape-shifting cities, and graveyards. They are microscopes fixed upon the regions of our interior lives we often neglect, where the death of God and the failures of institutions have given way to alternative modes of making sense of the world. They are cracked bedroom mirrors. Do you like what you see?

In "Rabbit Island," a so-called "non-inventor" conducts an experiment on an island inhabited exclusively by birds and is horrified by what the results portend. In "Myotragus," a man of privilege's understanding of the world is violently overthrown by the sight of a creature long thought extinct. Elsewhere, an unsightly "paw" grows from a writer's earlobe; an obsese grandmother floats silently in the corner of a room; a man becomes convinced he's turning into an insect.

Combining the gritty surrealism of Robert Bola o and David Lynch with the explosive interior meditations of Clarice Lispector, Rabbit Island deftly traverses the fickle ground between madness and freedom in eleven stories that are as visceral as they are innovative.