When I tell people that I’ve written a book about my cats, they often ask if it’s a children’s book or a humor book. One person who had read my first book—a cross-genre novella with a healthy dose of literary theory—asked if it featured cartoons. I understand that this is where the mind goes when someone thinks of cats: to the silly, the cute, the cozy. After all, our Instagram feeds are populated by cat memes.
This assumption bothers me to no end. I want another language to talk about my book; I want to do an interview where I don’t talk about cats at all. I wrote about two years of my life with my partner and our decision not to have kids; I wrote a book about making a family in the age of climate collapse. But, of course, it’s called Cat, and the story is impossible to tell without talking about our nonhuman family members. If you order it, the algorithm will serve you content about cats, not species decline.
And, aside from my book, the history of feline literature already shows that our relationships to cats are not always tender and sweet. Cats are complex creatures, and so are we. When we move beyond coziness, we better understand our history not just with cats but with animalia writ large. These six books do just that.
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