Published: 2022
No of Pages: 146
RRP: 24.95
Dimensions: 124x190 mm
ISBN Print: 978-0-6452350-1-2
ISBN E-Pub: 978-0-6452350-3-6
ISBN PDF: 978-0-6452350-2-9
Turin – Approaching Animals
by
Our lives with non-human animals are characterised by a kind of unremitting contempt. Habits of life, traditions of thought, and failures of imagination have rendered us blind to their invitations to companionship within a shared world. And philosophy has offered little to assuage our moral incomprehension, our soul blindness. Over the last few decades, it has fallen increasingly to novelists, like J.M. Coetzee, and poets, like David Brooks – artists whose language has slipped the leash of ‘pure reason – to awaken us to the possibility of a moral encounter with non-human animals. Brooks’ Turin is truly a startling achievement. It startles us from an impoverished slumber, leaving us wondering how we could have been so blind to the gentle presence, the insistent voices, the sly wisdom, the subtle reproach, the offers of friendship held out by our non-human companions. The world cannot help but look different once Brooks rips away the veil of our all-too-human conceit.
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About the Author
David Brooks is a poet, novelist, short fiction writer and essayist. He has taught literature at various Australian universities and is Honorary Associate Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. A vegan and animal rights advocate, he lives in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, and spends a portion of each year in a village on the coast of Slovenia. He has been called ‘one of the quiet masters of Australian poetry’, and ‘one of Australia’s most skilled, unusual and versatile writers’ (Sydney Morning Herald). Pangea, a major Italian literary website, recently described him as ‘the most eccentric writer in Oceania’. His works have been widely shortlisted for major Australian literary awards. He was the 2015/16 Australia Council Fellow in Fiction, in recognition of his extensive contribution to Australian and International literature. His work has been widely translated and anthologised. He has been a guest-of-honour at international conferences and literary festivals.
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