A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less

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• A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less
• Price: $18.00 $14.40
• Fiction-PB
• Pages - 218
• Anis Shivani
• 978-1-936196-96-8

C&R Press Open Submissions Selection 2019

This novel takes you on a roller-coaster journey through ten thousand years of human history with the most intelligent cat you will ever know.

PRAISE FOR A HISTORY OF THE CAT IN NINE CHAPTERS OR LESS

“The eight chapters of A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less are a raconteur orange cat’s time-traveling tale (the orange cat who’s sometime black, sometimes white, sometimes orange). He’s the dreamer and is the dream of the master. He fragments as an adventurer through time/village space. There is food; there are wars; there are owners (“How many owners can a being have in a single lifetime?”). There are modes of transport—chariots, trains, boats, and witches’ broomsticks. Though often on our laps, the cat is on his own, even as he’s in our minds. The brilliant, courageous cat, with the voice of a poet (not a pet) and the brush stroke of a painter, permits us to accompany him where no biped has trodden. A genuine treat!”
—Martine Bellen, author of Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems, This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems, and Moon in the Mirror: A Monodrama Opera.

This is a delightful lyrical journey into the heart and history of what it means to be a cat.
—David Grimm, author of Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs, and online news editor of Science.

“I love cats, but can’t live with them as they are stay-at-homes (well, some may be stray-from-homes) and I travel too much. But I can travel with and love the nomadic, Odyssean cat—a strange cross between Crazy Cat & Kosmic Kat—of this book written with a feline pen held by a velvety paw. Reader rest assured: this cat, even if it can show feisty claws when the need arises, will not give you catch scratch fever. The book and the cat will, however, utterly delight you. I wish it—the book—the same number of lives any cat, stray or literary has: at least nine.”
—Pierre Joris, author of Barzakh: Poems 2000-2012, Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry.

“Everywhere in this mind-bending novel the privileged human faculties come in for circumspection; what we like to think of as intelligence is put through rigorous scrutiny, as both our individual and collective choices appear questionable to the truly rational animal. Is the history of civilization a history of madness then? Do we have any higher claim to sanity than those beings human power has subdued? This hyperaware feline, one for the ages, dares to point out the obvious, about the way power is expropriated, justified to the point of invisibility. I enjoyed his intellectual company, his fearless articulation of realities that we like to keep buried under the surface. The cat in this challenging novel speaks the truth about the ways to truth, in a kind of electrified language whose rational poetry we tend to lose touch with as adults. Cognition becomes the greatest of mysteries all over again, thanks to this all-perceptive cat.”
—Marc Beckoff, Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy and Why They Matter