My Goat Ate Its Own Legs: Tales for Adults

by Alex Burrett

Burrett's imagination is as fertile as that of Jorge Luis Borges's, and he's more readable, and funnier. --The Independent on Sunday (London)

A debut collection of tales that explores the weird what-ifs of evolution, devotion, and universal disaster

In a voice so unfailingly chipper it's suspicious, Alex Burrett poses in fiction some disturbing yet certainly possible futures for the human race (and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061719684
• ISBN13: 9780061719684
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Provocative and Entertaining with one major distraction

Alex Burrett is a very talented new author. This collection is full of surprises and unique - sometimes perverse - perspectives. There's never time to get bored because you're always about to move on to the next story and a new weird place. It's not always clear what the point of every story is, but Burrett is such a master of the clever description and turn of phrase that I was nearly constantly entertained. My only complaint is that I've never seen a published book, especially from a major publisher (Harper Collins) that contained so many typos. It's as if nobody proofread it or they accidentally published a draft before it got copy edited. Seriously, it seemed like there was at least one major error (e.g., transposed words or incorrect contraction) every few pages. In any event, Burrett is clearly a major talent and I look forward to his next collection.

Irreverent yet relevant hyperbole

These thirty-one short shorts (none are more than fifteen pages) are entertaining and surprisingly several contain twists that will catch the reader off guard. None of the entries are clinkers, but a few are extremely profound about the "human" condition like "Dating Death" in which a suicide victim and Death begin seeing one another, Genghis Brown a rat of a species meeting the Prince of Darkness and "Anger Management" due to low levels of aggression. The title story is a stunner as the audience learns why the goat did what it did and its human owner did what he did afterward; but the kid only chomped himself to survive while his parents modestly but swiftly dine on their children as a gourmet delicacy. Irreverent yet relevant as even God has been divorced and Cyrano knows he has been put through a Bennett rinse cycle, fans who relish something different in their shorts (no pun intended as that would be to light for this collection), mostly humorous, but always hyperbolizing society with the uncanny dark stripping of the pompous. This is an odd winner, but best served over several weeks so the reader will be less likely to anticipate the mocking spins on human civilized society. Harriet Klausner