Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a mixed South Asian American writer from Northern California. Her debut collection of short stories,
What We Fed to the Manticore, is now out from Tin House. Her short fiction has been published in
the minnesota review,
Ecotone,
Southern Humanities Review, and
The Common.
A lifelong Californian, Kolluri lives in the Central Valley with her husband, a teacher and printmaker, and a very skittish cat named Fig.
At Electric Lit she tagged
nine books that feature animals as prominent characters. One title on the list:
The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James
If The White Bone [by Barbara Gowdy] takes readers inside the lives of elephants, The Tusk That Did the Damage pans wide to reveal a story about the interconnected lives of a poacher, a documentary filmmaker, and an elephant who, 
after being orphaned by poaching, rails against his subsequent captivity to become the ominous Gravedigger. Aside from the compelling story and the complexity with which it is rendered, the real gift of this novel is the immediacy of James’s prose. “He touched her warm trunk … its ridges and folds, and the very tip, a single, empty finger with which she had pinched him a gooseberry not two hours before.” James describes the Gravedigger in the moments after his orphaning in a way that orphans readers with him—and does something similar with the poacher and the filmmaker. I love how this technique infuses the novel with empathy, and how this empathy, in turn, collapses the distance between all of the characters.
Read about
another entry on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
What We Fed to the Manticore, is now out from Tin House. Her short fiction has been published in the minnesota review, Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, and The Common.
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