"To 'behold an animal,' Thangam Ranvindranathan suggestively argues, is literature's temptation and taunt; the animal is always slightly 'out of focus' and so a token of literature's own unrealness. Deeply theoretical and written in a prose that renders the animal at once palpable and unknowable, her readings demonstrate how dogs, horses, crabs, and hedgehogs mark the limits of representation even as they give life and breath to language." --Kari Weil, author of Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now "In this searchingly intelligent book, Ravindranathan challenges the idea that fictional representations finally diminish the lives of animals. Through a series of dazzling explorations of contemporary French writing, she shows instead how animals mark the place in which word and world are folded interminably one into the other. Behold an Animal demonstrates that the subtle points at which the language of creatureliness and the creatureliness of language are braided together call for radically new--because unapologetically uncertain--forms of thinking and reading. What makes Ravindranathan's study remarkable is that it does justice to animals by refusing to know who or what they are." --David L. Clark, McMaster University.