After the Plains queered him, Dave Madden decided to return the favor. This outstanding collection of short stories tells the tale of a different kind of difference-one not set in the glittering lights of New York or Los Angeles, but in the grand and wide American Midwest. For Madden's characters, their queerness is part of the environment, like the soil, the sky, and the supermarket: an HIV-positive chemist uses football to connect with his brothers; a 17-year-old girl tussles with a cartoon cobra to avoid thinking about the mother who abandoned her; and a hotel concierge starts attending Mass even though his partner was molested by a priest. In seeking out the ordinary struggles of extraordinary people trying to figure out their place within families and communities, Madden masterfully explores what it means to be an outsider always looking in.

Why would someone create or own the mounted skin of a dead animal? That's the question Dave Madden explores in "The Authentic Animal". He begins with the life story of Carl Akeley, father of modern taxidermy, who started by stuffing a canary and ended with creating the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at The American Museum of Natural History. To get a first-hand glimpse at this world, Madden travels to the World Taxidermy Championships, the garage workplaces of people who mount freeze-dried pets for bereaved owners and the classrooms of a taxidermy academy where students stretch deer pelts over foam bases. On his travels he looks at the forms taxidermy takes - hunting trophies, museum dioramas, roadside novelties, pet memorials - and considers what taxidermy has to tell us about human-animal relationships.