What to read after Animals in Our Days?

Each story in Mohamed Makhzangi’s unique collection Animals in Our Days features a different animal species and its fraught relationship with humans—water buffalo in a rural village gone mad from electric lights, brass grasshoppers purchased in a crowded Bangkok market, or ghostly rabbits that haunt the site of a long-ago brutal military crackdown. Other stories tell of bear-trainers in India and of the American invasion of Iraq as experienced by a foal, deer, and puppies. Originally published in 2006, Makhzangi’s stories are part of a long tradition of writings on animals in Arabic literature. In this collection, animals offer a mute testament to the brutality and callousness of humanity, particularly when modernity sunders humans from the natural environment. Makhzangi is one of Egypt’s most perceptive and nuanced authors, merging a writer’s empathy with a scientist’s curiosity about the world. Like Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes, or J. M. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals, Makhzangi’s stories trace the numinous, almost supernatural, connections between our species and others. In these resonant, haunting tales, Animals in Our Days foregrounds our urgent need to reacquire the sense of awe, humility, and respect that once characterized our relationship with animals.