Animal Crackers Tinti, Hannah

Hannah Tinti's debut story collection drops you into worlds where the strange and the tender collide. A boy keeps a real tiger in his closet. A woman steals a baby from a hospital. A teenager navigates her mother's death while working at an aquarium. These aren't fables or whimsy — they're sharp, unsettling stories about grief, loneliness, and the desperate things people do when life fractures. Tinti writes with the precision of a surgeon and the heart of someone who's seen things go sideways. Her characters are odd, damaged, deeply human. The animals in these pages — tigers, seals, dogs — aren't symbols, they're accomplices. This collection won the John Gardiner Fiction Book Award and launched Tinti as a writer who knows how to gut-punch you quietly. For fans of Karen Russell's strange realism or Aimee Bender's emotional weirdness.