Two centuries of literary homages to the fascinating feline: stories by
writers of every stripe--from P.G. Wodehouse to Doris Lessing, from
Damon Runyon to Steven Millhauser.
The essential unknowableness of cats has inspired many flights of fancy:
Italo Calvino's secret city of cats in "The Garden of Stubborn Cats,"
the disappearing feline in Ursula K. Le Guin's mind-twisting
"Schrödinger's Cat," the cartoon rodent and his cartoon nemesis in
Steven Millhauser's "Cat 'n' Mouse." Cats flaunt their superiority in
Angela Carter's bawdy retelling of "Puss-in-Boots" and in Stephen
Vincent Benét's "The King of the Cats," in which two impossibly suave
foreigners are revealed as even more exotic than they pretend to be. In
"The Islands" by Alice Adams and "I See You, Bianca" by Maeve Brennan we
see how much cats can mean to their humans. And the inimitable Saki lets
us hear what cats really think of us in "Tobermory," his tale of a
tactless talking animal.
In these and other stories, this delightful book offers cat lovers a
many- faceted tribute to the beguilingly mysterious objects of their
affection.