Animal: Notes from a Labyrinth

A radically uninhibited book that delves deeply into the muck and glory of life, confronting the enduring perplexities of love, art, and  the human bondage to pleasure.

At times exuberant and at other times dark and haunting, Fishbone’s stories explore the twilight zone of New York’s seedy bars and cocaine dens, reveal the troubled soul of a German expressionist painter, describe a latter-day “hunger artist” exorcising his own demons, confront the tangled lives of sex workers at the margins of society, and link our contemporary political, social, and personal fixations with the desires, anxieties, and hang-ups of Romans like Catullus and Horace. A work both outrageous and wise, Animal relentlessly probes the human condition in all its wretched and enthralling complexity.

Alan Fishbone was born and raised in New York City. He is a scholar and translator of ancient Greek and Latin and a professional sailboat captain. When not in New York, he lives aboard the cutter rigged sailboat Pelekun, usually to be found somewhere in the Western hemisphere.