Rating: 
Summary: An Impressive and Engaging Debut
Review: "Everyone who works with animals has a mark somewhere," observes an elephant keeper in the title story of Hannah Tinti's debut short story collection, ANIMAL CRACKERS. For some these marks are physical --- Sandy, who is in charge of the monkey house, has a scar across her face where a gorilla bit her; another elephant keeper has lost an arm. But for others, the marks are deeply psychological: Mike, a failed poet, trains sea lions and tries to pawn his chapbooks to zoogoers, and Ann sells tickets while obsessively guarding her bald cat."Animal Crackers" is a fitting introduction to the ten stories that follow, all of which explore characters' relationships with various animals and how they locate meaning in giraffes at the zoo, a neighbor's cat, a stuffed bear in a museum, or an ex-boyfriend's snake. Tinti, who co-founded and edits the literary magazine One Story, mines these human/animal interactions for surprisingly effective metaphors that eloquently reveal her characters' views of themselves and the world around them. In "Reasonable Terms," three giraffes go on strike for better habitat conditions. Lying prone on the ground, their eyes rolled back and their tongues lolling out, they play dead and refuse to entertain their audiences. The predicament causes the zookeeper to reflect on his own marriage: "The zookeeper looked at the animals prostrate in the dirt and was reminded of pre-Darwinian concepts of evolution --- that the length of giraffes' necks was determined by stretching to obtain what they desire. He wondered if this kind of despair was inside Matilda." Tinti does not focuses solely on the human element: playing equal roles are giraffes Doe, Francesco, and especially Lulu, who learns to astral project herself and visits the zookeeper's dreams. Tinti has a taste for bittersweet whimsy, which often results in stories marked by a wide-eyed magical realism. In "Preservation," Mary, the daughter of a well-known artist, works late afternoons and evenings restoring murals in a museum diorama. But when the museum gallery empties of visitors, a stuffed bear in the middle of the room seems to come to life. Tinti wisely underplays the effect, letting it complement and ultimately represent Mary's gradual realization of her father's mortality. An entire collection of such concept-heavy stories risks repetition or inconsequentiality, but fortunately ANIMAL CRACKERS isn't intended as a stunt and Tinti doesn't make animals the center of every piece. In several stories, they play merely a tangential or sometimes abstract role. In "Hit Man of the Year," for example, a bison on a buffalo nickel symbolizes love and extinction for an Italian mob hitman. Dark and affecting, "Bloodworks" barely mentions a neighbor's cat until the last few pages when the story, about the parents of an increasingly menacing child, has grown bleakly unresolvable and nightmarishly hopeless. That this story can exist so closely and naturally with lighter fare like "Gallus gallus" --- which features, among other oddball characters, a man who never learned to tie his shoes --- reveals Tinti's considerable range of tone and emotion. Not everything in ANIMAL CRACKERS works quite so well, however. Tinti's style is streamlined and focused, and every element is perfectly calibrated to exact a particular emotion from the reader or to reinforce a specific theme in the material. Such control is impressive, but too often, as in "Hit Man of the Year" and "Gallus gallus," it chokes the stories of spontaneity and creates the sense that the characters do not extend beyond the boundaries of the first and last sentences. Tinti's conceptual derring-do occasionally outstrips her practical abilities, but ANIMAL CRACKERS remains an impressive and engaging debut from an author who has no fear of sticking her neck out. --- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner
Rating:
Summary: An Impressive and Engaging Debut
Review: "Everyone who works with animals has a mark somewhere," observes an elephant keeper in the title story of Hannah Tinti's debut short story collection, ANIMAL CRACKERS. For some these marks are physical --- Sandy, who is in charge of the monkey house, has a scar across her face where a gorilla bit her; another elephant keeper has lost an arm. But for others, the marks are deeply psychological: Mike, a failed poet, trains sea lions and tries to pawn his chapbooks to zoogoers, and Ann sells tickets while obsessively guarding her bald cat. "Animal Crackers" is a fitting introduction to the ten stories that follow, all of which explore characters' relationships with various animals and how they locate meaning in giraffes at the zoo, a neighbor's cat, a stuffed bear in a museum, or an ex-boyfriend's snake. Tinti, who co-founded and edits the literary magazine One Story, mines these human/animal interactions for surprisingly effective metaphors that eloquently reveal her characters' views of themselves and the world around them. In "Reasonable Terms," three giraffes go on strike for better habitat conditions. Lying prone on the ground, their eyes rolled back and their tongues lolling out, they play dead and refuse to entertain their audiences. The predicament causes the zookeeper to reflect on his own marriage: "The zookeeper looked at the animals prostrate in the dirt and was reminded of pre-Darwinian concepts of evolution --- that the length of giraffes' necks was determined by stretching to obtain what they desire. He wondered if this kind of despair was inside Matilda." Tinti does not focuses solely on the human element: playing equal roles are giraffes Doe, Francesco, and especially Lulu, who learns to astral project herself and visits the zookeeper's dreams. Tinti has a taste for bittersweet whimsy, which often results in stories marked by a wide-eyed magical realism. In "Preservation," Mary, the daughter of a well-known artist, works late afternoons and evenings restoring murals in a museum diorama. But when the museum gallery empties of visitors, a stuffed bear in the middle of the room seems to come to life. Tinti wisely underplays the effect, letting it complement and ultimately represent Mary's gradual realization of her father's mortality. An entire collection of such concept-heavy stories risks repetition or inconsequentiality, but fortunately ANIMAL CRACKERS isn't intended as a stunt and Tinti doesn't make animals the center of every piece. In several stories, they play merely a tangential or sometimes abstract role. In "Hit Man of the Year," for example, a bison on a buffalo nickel symbolizes love and extinction for an Italian mob hitman. Dark and affecting, "Bloodworks" barely mentions a neighbor's cat until the last few pages when the story, about the parents of an increasingly menacing child, has grown bleakly unresolvable and nightmarishly hopeless. That this story can exist so closely and naturally with lighter fare like "Gallus gallus" --- which features, among other oddball characters, a man who never learned to tie his shoes --- reveals Tinti's considerable range of tone and emotion. Not everything in ANIMAL CRACKERS works quite so well, however. Tinti's style is streamlined and focused, and every element is perfectly calibrated to exact a particular emotion from the reader or to reinforce a specific theme in the material. Such control is impressive, but too often, as in "Hit Man of the Year" and "Gallus gallus," it chokes the stories of spontaneity and creates the sense that the characters do not extend beyond the boundaries of the first and last sentences. Tinti's conceptual derring-do occasionally outstrips her practical abilities, but ANIMAL CRACKERS remains an impressive and engaging debut from an author who has no fear of sticking her neck out. --- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner
Rating: 
Summary: AN INCREDIBLE NEW VOICE
Review: Finally I found a new voice in short story writing that reminds us how good the form can be. The stories are original, funny and touch on aspects of our rawest emotions. First Raymond Carver, then Thom Jones, and now Hannah Tinti has resurrected the short story.
Rating:
Summary: Entertainingly Macabre
Review: Hannah Tinti has written an array of entertaining dark stories. She is very talented and obviously has the gift of a very imaginative mind. For the reader that is looking for something dark and well written, this is a perfect choice for summer reading. It might as well be good for xmas, reading Animal Crackers might just make the reader a gentler, smarter person.
Rating:
Summary: Entertainingly Macabre
Review: Hannah Tinti has written an array of entertaining dark stories. She is very talented and obviously has the gift of a very imaginative mind. For the reader that is looking for something dark and well written, this is a perfect choice for summer reading. It might as well be good for xmas, reading Animal Crackers might just make the reader a gentler, smarter person.
Rating:
Summary: A Menagerie of Wonderful Words
Review: I read every page of this magical book with the excitement of discovering something new about myself and the world we share. Tinti's insight into the soul of every character, and the way she magically imbues animals with a prescient lens into the human condition, will touch you in a way like no other collection of short stories I've ever read has done before. Realizing this is her first book, I can't wait to see what else springs from the imagination of this new talent! Whatever it is, Tinti's books, current and future, like her storied animal companions, will roar!
Rating:
Summary: a pitch-perfect debut
Review: Reviewed by Felicia C. Sullivan, Small Spiral Notebook
Animals take center stage in the bewitching debut story collection, Animal Crackers. In these perfectly pitched eleven stories, Hannah Tinti navigates strange relationships, absurd and quirky human behavior, personal desires and obsession.
In ?Reasonable Terms?, a team of African giraffes in proper union fashion draft a list of demands to a zookeeper including improved quality of life and a more exotic d?cor. Rather displeased with the slew of demands, the zookeeper publicly refuses to negotiate for ?he couldn?t have every species writing lists and such. What, for example, would the hippos demand? Or the wombats?? The crafty giraffes retaliate and initiate a media circus by faking their own death. What unravels are our capacity for fleeting hysteria and forget ? the obsession with scandal evasion and damage control. And when the photographers leave and the headlines subside, what is left are animals carted away to another zoo. In such beautiful Orwellian fashion, Tinti gives soul and individuality to these desperate creatures.
In ?Home Sweet Home?, a dog is eyewitness to the undoing of a quiet neighborhood and its complex inhabitants. A bored and lusty housewife, Pat, grows frustrated after the death of her husband Clyde?s father leaves Clyde impotent. Left to her own devices, Pat takes up with her next door neighbor, Mr. Mitchell. A brief affair with a Venezuelan prostitute results with Mitchell?s son, Manuel. The death of the mother brings the strange boy who is most comfortable hiding sleeping in garbage bins, to the Mitchell home and soon a surprising connection occurs between the child and Mrs. Mitchell, leaving the father to the wayside. Adultery and public indiscretions lead to a satisfying climax.
Dark human behavior is paramount and constructed beautifully by Tinti in the powerful, ?Slim?s Last Ride? . A year later after a father abandons his wife and child, a small rabbit arrives on the child?s doorstep. Through the course of the story, the mother watches in horror as her son projects his rage onto his pet. In ?Gallus Gallus? , an arrogant husband takes out his anger at his wife on her prized rooster. Animals serve to painfully mitigate characters who feel they have no other outlet for their longing or frustrations. Although Tinti doesn?t shy away from the gruesome, the brutality in her stories is never gratuitous, and is an accurate mirror for one?s psychology and pathological obsessions.
Overall, the tales in Animal Crackers are fascinating and exceptionally wrought but simply narrated. In Tinti?s stories one will never fumble on convoluted language and heavy-handed magical realism with animals serving as ?tropes?, but the reader will be won over by the author?s compassion for her characters and the fantastic animals that inhabit their lives.
Rating: 
Summary: Disquieting and Riveting
Review: The reader who comes to Tinti's tales expecting a tame petting zoo will, with swiftly mounting unease, realize that he has instead entered a darkly dangerous den. Each story in this collection is tightly coiled and poised to strike. The animals are endowed with preternatural intelligence and will. More disturbingly, the human characters evince a vicious predatory streak and an incalculability of action and reaction. By upending our perceptions of man and beast, Tinti keeps us deliciously off-balance. Her unflinching descriptions and trenchant insights combine to make Animal Crackers a riveting and haunting read.
Rating:
Summary: This is a very very good book.
Review: These are excellent stories. They are jarring and punchy and fun. I couldn't put the book down until I finished all of them, and then I got mad because I wanted more. My wife also loved the book and she's really really picky. I'd like to say more, but I just finished my coke™ and I have to get up to get another one.
Rating:
Summary: This is a very very good book.
Review: These are excellent stories. They are jarring and punchy and fun. I couldn't put the book down until I finished all of them, and then I got mad because I wanted more. My wife also loved the book and she's really really picky. I'd like to say more, but I just finished my coke™ and I have to get up to get another one.
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