In his novel Animals, we follow Don LePan’s characters into a not-too-distant future, where human beings with birth defects are slaughtered as edible products. Readers’ sense of injustice will be roused by LePan’s descriptions of suffering in the feedlots–but can a novel inspire us to stop eating factory-farmed meat? Laura Roberts hopes it can.

I’ve been meaning to post about the Book Bench’s whimsical dress-up-your-pet-as-literary-character Critterati contest for several days, but there have been technical difficulties. Namely, my cat, Mr. Oliver Dash Stameshkin-Zook, has proved resistant to dressing up as Dickensian orphan Oliver Twist. Blood was shed; there may even be scars. What there isn’t, sadly, is a photograph [...]