FOMITE

After Rae's ear is shot off by a jittery security guard at the health food store, the insurance settlement allows her to take a year off from teaching. She spends it volunteering at the Los Angeles Zoo. These days, except for her best friend Jennie, Rae has little use for human beings. She loves cats—lots of cats, and the refugee she cares for, airlifted from Afghanistan to safety, is not a person but a mountain goat. As the US goes to war and baboons fall deeply, tragically, in love, Rae's involvement with Gorilla Theater—street agitators raising awareness of animal rights—leads inexorably to confrontations over human rights. Especially when Jennie is disappeared. Confessions of a Carnivore is an antic romp through a minefield, a novel about animal behavior, endangered species, endangered democracy, and love.

 

About the Author

Diane Lefer is an award-winning fiction author, playwright, and occasional rabble-rouser. She has studied primate behavior for the Research Department of the Los Angeles Zoo for almost twenty years and brings attention and affection to the rescue cats at the Amanda Foundation. Her ongoing collaboration with Colombian exile Hector Aristizábal includes Theater of the Oppressed workshops in the US and abroad, their nonfiction book, The Blessing Next to the Wound: a story of art, activism, and transformation, and their play, Nightwind, which has toured the US and more than 30 other countries as part of the worldwide movement to end the practice of torture.

 

Diane’s website

Review on JJ Amaworo Wilson, author

Review on Talented Reader: a literary journal

Review on LitReactor

 

Praise

Carole Maso called California Transit an "engrossing dream-journey filled with wish and dread, at once desperate, hilarious, bewildering, hope-filled....we are remarkably a little different than we were before, a little more resourceful, a little less alone — how we've enjoyed the menagerie!"

 

"{These stories}... are smart, well written and have that most elusive of qualities: vitality. They take on difficult issues — immigration, racism, torture, animal suffering, environmental degradation. That makes her stories sound humorless; they aren't. A vein of wry wit runs through them."

— Judith Freeman, Los Angeles Times

 

"One of the most gifted and witty writers around."

— Oscar Hijuelos