Animale is Laure Anders’ first book. In this carefully crafted collection, the author switches between stories focused on desire, the body and animality, and ones inspired by her family’s past.

Carnal, sometimes violent tales, inscribed in a short term of risk, flight, fall or dispossession, intertwine with portraits of people from the author’s own life: her grandfather, her father, and, in the book’s final stages, Laure, who has become a full-fledged fictional character (Laure No Name).

Far from intending to be autobiographical, Animale aims to grasp, in the shape of brief snapshots, the impulses and disorder that runs through even the most seemingly discreet and dissimilar lives in order to express the pulsing of a vast, collective, fantastical body – our dark, animalistic unconscious.

This first book is a short-story collection whose themes are family history and the body. A real find.