Instead of needing constant Internet connectivity, these feral children live way off the grid. In this age of overscheduled and sheltered children, these stories take the ongoing debate over nature vs.
Wild boys and girls have run through American literature since Huckleberry Finn fled the “sivilized” world, but now they are popping up in a variety of settings. In novels already published this year, an orphaned elephant narrates part of Tania James’ The Tusk That Did the Damageand a blind grizzly bear plays a major role in Christian Kiefer’s The Animals.Īs part of this trend, feral children, who blur the line between animal and human, have made their way back into the fields of American fiction.
And animals are coming off as more thoughtful than ever. From the cross-species siblings in Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are Completely Beside Ourselves to the three animals trying to avoid slaughter in David Duchovny’s Holy Cow, fiction writers are overtly (and sometimes playfully) asking what’s so humane about human beings. The ostensibly solid barrier between wild animals and civilized humans is being torn apart by a pack of recent American novels and short stories. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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