Towards a Menagerie

Fiction. These are children’s stories for adults, you could say…and they have the sort of quirkiness, humour and wisdom that might be expected from such an enterprise. Read…and enjoy. Miller is a conjurer of narrative, pulling not rabbits but marsupial mouse, flamingo and others out of the hat or from behind the reader’s ear. Said ear takes delight in the adventures of this intrepid gang. The animals have a hard time but they come through. As does the reader, entertained, educated and re-humanised by this encounter with the Other.–Anthony Rudolf

This is a book for dreamers and those who can still summon up what WH Hudson called ‘the animism of childhood, or delight’ in Buddhist Jataka Tales and Beatrix Potter, Kipling and Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The living world speaks to us. One of my favorite characters is Antechinus–the pouched mouse (marsupial, really) of Miller’s Australian homeland–a fine example of convergent evolution. Throughout his career, David Miller has been drawing the unlikely worlds together in crystalline structures. You want to look forever; you learn what lucid means.–John Martone

In TOWARDS A MENAGERIE, David Miller, that versatile polymath, hooks up Kenji Miyazawa with Ub Iwerks–and Ovid!–Guy Birchard