At times they feel like the black and white photographs of Matthew Genitempo in Jasper, a book that was reviewed in The New Yorker. There are more than moments of strangeness and indecision. Most of Angela Mitchell’s characters in this debut collection are caught in that predicament. The woman feels strange about the situation, a strangeness intensified by the remoteness of the place she’s in: “She was somewhere she’d never been before, miles, probably, from the nearest highway, deep in the Arkansas woods.” She has awakened the bobcat now, looking at her like an unwanted third-party on the man’s bed, a rival. Soon, awkwardness enters the scene, the moment the woman wakes up after her nap and feels the bobcat’s belly moving up and down beside her, instead of her date. The man loves animals and keeps them in his house, including birds and snakes, but the bobcat is special. There is a scene in Unnatural Habitats & Other Stories where a bobcat lounges on a bed between a man and a woman.
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