front cover of Animal Stories
Animal Stories
Narrating across Species Lines
Susan McHugh
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, Animal Stories argues that key creative developments in narrative form became inseparable from shifts in animal politics and science in the past century. Susan McHugh traces representational patterns specific to modern and contemporary fictions of cross-species companionship through a variety of media—including novels, films, fine art, television shows, and digital games—to show how nothing less than the futures of all species life is at stake in narrative forms.

McHugh’s investigations into fictions of people relying on animals in civic and professional life—most obviously those of service animal users and female professional horse riders—showcase distinctly modern and human–animal forms of intersubjectivity. But increasingly graphic violence directed at these figures indicates their ambivalent significance to changing configurations of species.

Reading these developments with narrative adaptations of traditional companion species relations during this period— queer pet memoirs and farm animal fictions—McHugh clarifies the intercorporeal intimacies—the perforations of species boundaries now proliferating in genetic and genomic science—and embeds the representation of animals within biopolitical frameworks.
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front cover of Sergie and the White Seal
Sergie and the White Seal
Garrett Igayux Pletnikoff
University of Alaska Press, 2026

“This story takes place on the island of Saint Paul, away and away in the Bering Sea. Saint Paul is home to many residents, from the blue foxes to the elusive reindeer, but the largest of these groups are the northern fur seals and the Unangan.”

So begins the story of Sergie Oustikoff, an Unangan teenager who can’t wait to leave his small island home; and Kotick, an albino fur seal who can imagine no better place in all the world. The two live separate lives, divided by species and habitat—until one day when an unknown danger arrives on Saint Paul Island, bringing fish shortages that threaten the livelihood of humans and fur seals alike. As Kotick turns to Sergie for help, Sergie grapples with the strange, shamanistic powers that seem to burgeon within him whenever the white seal is near. Along with a host of animal and human companions, the two embark on a quest to save their island that will lead them through the annals of history—and into a world of magic they never imagined. 

One hundred and thirty-two years after “The White Seal” first appeared in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), this retelling lends it a long-overdue Indigenous perspective. It recharacterizes the fur seals and the Unangan not as mortal enemies, but as equal partners in stewardship of their lands and seas. With Unangan Traditional Knowledge woven into the fabric of the story, and featuring over ninety Unangam Tunuu words and phrases, the tale of Sergie and Kotick invites readers to celebrate Saint Paul Island and all those who call it home.

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