16 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 9, 2020
I
’m back in Italy, in the salon of
the American Academy in Rome,
talking with Francesca Marciano
about Animal Spirit, her new
story collection coming from
Pantheon in June. These new stories
deal with relationships: between men
and women, between friends, between
humans and the natural world.
Marciano’s characters are at various
turning points in their lives—the end
of adulterous affair, the beginning of
romance, the mental breakdown of a
long-ago lover—and each epiphany is
sparked by an encounter with an
animal: a vicious seagull, a small dog on
a country road, an albino Burmese
python, starlings circling in the sky.
“There is something animalistic,
primitive about feelings, about relation-
ships,” Marciano says. “What is our
rage? It’s animalistic. I started thinking
about stories and animals kept coming
up, wild animals. And when I thought
about a theme for the collection, halfway
through I saw it was animal spirit.
Unruly with its own catalogue. There is
this intelligence all around us, and we
hardly see it.”
Time to note life’s circles: Marciano
lived for years in Kenya, the setting for
her first novel, 1998’s Rules of the Wild,
which marked the beginning of her rela-
tionship with Robin Desser, who is now
Random House’s editor-in-chief. “I
remember sending final edits via DHL,
while Francesca was camping by a
remote river, and worrying if she would
ever get them,” Desser tells me.
Marciano has published three novels,
but her heart these days seems taken
with stories. She and I first met in 2014,Wild Kingdom
In Francesca Marciano’s new collection, Italians experience love and loss,
violence, and madness, at home and abroad
Column|OPEN BOOK
Louisa Ermelino