As long as humans have told each other stories and created art, animals have been involved. The titles highlighted in the New Books Newsletter this week run the gamut of animals in writing, from simply using their names as figures of speech to anthropomorphized main characters. Sometimes the animals symbolize larger points the author wants to make, sometimes they're simply used as comic relief. Always the animals, or their culturally defined traits, cause the plot to turn and move around our understanding of the stories the authors want to tell.

While many associate stories of animals with children's literature, there's a rich tradition of animals as protagonists in books written just for adults. Nazis burned Felix Salten's Bambi: A Life in the Woods as the novel was perceived as "sympathetic to the plight of the Jews". Salten, an avid hunter, wrote the decidedly gory novel as an antifascist allegory. It was only when he visited an Atlanta HBCU in 1931 that he realized children were reading the English translation! If anyone in Atlanta were looking for a copyright-free title to translate from German to English that would sell relatively well, Fulton County Libraries would be among the first in line to offer Salten's Five Minutes in America to our readers. Until then, we'll just be happy that his literary influence extends to the excellent new titles below.