NPR’s Elissa Nadworny talks with GennaRose Nethercott about the power of folklore and her collection of strange and fantastic short stories, “Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart.”
ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
According to GennaRose Nethercott, there are 50 beasts to break your heart – among them, maglits, easily taken in as pets…
GENNAROSE NETHERCOTT: (Reading) They do a fine job with the dishes, licking china cups clean with their pronged tongues to stack in neat rows on parlour shelves.
NADWORNY: …Also archilots…
NETHERCOTT: (Reading) Fear the archilot – the house with knees. Fear its gait. Fear the insatiable lure toward restlessness.
NADWORNY: …And the blue-bellied ib.
NETHERCOTT: (Reading) Ever since ibs figured out how to use the phone, it’s been prank calls day and night. They’re terrible jokesters because blue-bellied ibs cannot lie. Instead, they’ll ring you to tell it to you straight – the recycling is all going to the landfill. If you’d kept practicing the fiddle, you’d be good by now instead of dreadful. That comb-over isn’t fooling anyone. One day, you too will die.
NADWORNY: “Fifty Beasts To Break Your Heart” is the title story in GennaRose Nethercott’s strange, sometimes creepy, sometimes witty new book, and she joins us now to talk about some of her stories. Welcome to the program.
NETHERCOTT: Thank you so much for having me.
NADWORNY: So that title story is a bestiary. It’s sort of an encyclopedia of animals, real or imagined. How did you come up with so many creatures?
NETHERCOTT: In the medieval era, there were these collected bestiaries, these sort of encyclopedias of all the known creatures, that monks would gather. And they were these fantastic, weird allegorical texts, because on the one hand, they were just, you know, definitions of known animals. But on the other hand, A, many of these monks had never seen these animals before, so their descriptions of them were just truly kooky stuff. One of my…
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