Paperback Tigers: Breaking the Zoo

ELISHA COHN n recent years, numerous highly lauded works for the global mass market in literary fiction have centered on zoo animals' escape or the destruction of zoos during wartime. When The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle's chapter "The Zoo Attack" was published in The New Yorker in 1995, it was central to the birth of Haruki Murakami's reputation in English. Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi (2001), in which a teenaged boy cohabits in a lifeboat with an abandoned zoo's last surviving tiger, won the 2002 Man Booker Prize and a Christmas 2012 film adaptation. European zoos received attention in Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife (2011), a finalist for the ´ National Book Award, which likewise depicted the decrepitude of animal-centered institutions for human recreation, while Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife (2007) offered a historical take on the Warsaw Zoo during the Second World War. The American bombing of the Baghdad Zoo in 2003, which led to the death or escape of many animals, inspired not only Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon's graphic novel Pride of Baghdad (2006) but also Rajiv Joseph's play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a 2010 Pulitzer finalist. Portraying the fragile lives of captive animals in recent crises, these works imagine humans and animals as sharing a milieu. In completing this essay I am grateful for the support of the Brett de Bary Mellon Interdisciplinary Writing Group on animal studies at Cornell University, as well as the English department--in particular, Elizabeth Anker, Kevin Attell, Roger Gilbert, Peter Gilgen, Antoine Traisnel, and Samantha Zacher. I am thankful to Amanda Jo Goldstein, Eric Hamako, Ishion Hutchinson, and Benjamin Parris for suggesting texts; to the editors and anonymous readers at Contemporary Literature; and to Theo Black. Contemporary Literature 56, 4 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/15/0004-0568 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of...