Cat Stories [Hardcover]

Two centuries of literary homages to the fascinating feline: stories by writers of every stripe—from P.G. Wodehouse to Doris Lessing, from Damon Runyon to Steven Millhauser.

The essential unknowableness of cats has inspired many flights of fancy: Italo Calvino’s secret city of cats in “The Garden of Stubborn Cats,” the disappearing feline in Ursula K. Le Guin’s mind-twisting “Schrödinger’s Cat,” the cartoon rodent and his cartoon nemesis in Steven Millhauser’s “Cat ’n’ Mouse.” Cats flaunt their superiority in Angela Carter’s bawdy retelling of “Puss-in-Boots” and in Stephen Vincent Benét’s “The King of the Cats,” in which two impossibly suave foreigners are revealed as even more exotic than they pretend to be. In “The Islands” by Alice Adams and “I See You, Bianca” by Maeve Brennan we see how much cats can mean to their humans. And the inimitable Saki lets us hear what cats really think of us in “Tobermory,” his tale of a tactless talking animal.

In these and other stories, this delightful book offers cat lovers a many- faceted tribute to the beguilingly mysterious objects of their affection. PEOPLE AND THEIR CATS 

Alice Adams “The Islands”
Maeve Brennan “I See You, Bianca”
Damon Runyon “Lillian”
Doris Lessing “An Old Woman and Her Cat”
Saki “Tobermory”
P. G. Wodehouse “Cats Will Be Cats”
 
CATS AND THEIR PEOPLE

Rudyard Kipling “The Cat That Walked By Himself”
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman “The Cat”
Walter de la Mare “Broomsticks”
Patricia Highsmith “Ming’s Biggest Prey”
Edgar Allan Poe “The Black Cat”
Neil Gaiman “The Price”

FANCIFUL FELINES

Fritz LeibelÓ#