With Animal

In a perfect world, I would have written about With Animal before Carol and Kelly read at the store last week, but you read when you can, and I only fully dove into this book's strange stories after their visit. Here's the premise: in each tale—"With Dragon," "With Sheep," "With Spider," etc.—a human parent gives birth to an inhuman child. Seamlessly collaborating, Guess and Magee carry off each scenario with sprightly, subversive reinvention, and their cross-species experiments prove ideal vessels for the weird inhabitation of pregnancy and the inexplicable compulsions of love and parenthood.