The ten best tigers in fiction

Katy Yocom was born and raised in Atchison, Kansas. After graduating from the University of Kansas with a degree in journalism, she moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she has lived ever since. Her new novel, Three Ways to Disappear, won the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature and was a finalist for the Dzanc Books Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize and the UNO Press Publishing Lab Prize.

In researching the novel, Yocom traveled to India, funded by a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. In 2019, she received an Al Smith Fellowship Award for artistic excellence from the Kentucky Arts Council. She has also received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and served as writer-in-residence at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Crosshatch Hill House, and PLAYA. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Salon, LitHub, American Way (the American Airlines magazine), The Louisville Review, decomP magazinE, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University.

Yocom lives with her family in Louisville and serves as associate director of the low-residency graduate writing programs of the School of Creative and Professional Writing at Spalding University, where it's her great good fortune to work with writers every day.

At LitHub she tagged the ten best tigers in fiction, including:

Yann Martel, Life of Pi

My first tiger as an adult was Richard Parker, and I loved him passionately. True, he wanted to eat Pi, but every time Pi tended to him and Richard Parker allowed it, my heart lifted. The privilege of that contact moved me: the human serving the wild beast. Take that literally or metaphorically—and the novel invites you to decide for yourself—the relationship between Richard Parker and Pi is a master class on storytelling, faith, and the terrible will to live.

Read about another entry on the list.

Life of Pi is on Jodi Picoult's recommended list, Martyn Ford's top ten list of fantastical pets in children's literature, Off the Shelf's list of eight great books told by child narrators, Janis MacKay's top ten list of books set on the ocean, Kathryn Williams's list of six notable novels set in just one place, Scott Greenstone's list of seven top allegorical novels, Sara Gruen's six favorite books list, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on castaways, and John Mullan's list of ten of the best zoos in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue