Animal Kingdom

stories by Alex Behr

In late 2019, award-winning Portland author Alex Behr reunited with Chris Hartman, a lost love, after thirty years. Their brief, intense romance in San Francisco left behind no photos, and yet they’d never forgotten each other. Chris soon moved to Portland to start a new life with her. Tragically and suddenly, he was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive prion illness, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and died just months after the move.

Tender, erotic, and damned, the nineteen stories in Animal Kingdom are inspired by Behr’s grief. It explores desire and searches for meaning from chaos and loss. With piercing humor, the collection explores a couple bonding over alien visitations, the brutal accommodations in a marriage between musicians, sexuality during menopause, and a teen girl’s bruising path to feminism via her Fender guitar. The stories share the theme that humans can’t escape their primal urges and are intelligent animals in the flawed kingdom we all share.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“The pieces that make up Alex Behr’s Animal Kingdom are feral and wry, enticingly TMI, their language and forms gutsy yet perfectly befitting. The core of every story is tender and wise, declaring, of the heart, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. I snorted laughter, I cried fat tears. I loved this book.”

—Karleigh Frisbie Brogan, author of Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts

“Alex Behr’s Animal Kingdom is a beautiful yet brutalist interweaving of so many facets of the human condition. It’s as if I witnessed both a coming apart at the seams and then the slow, methodical and often messy stitching back together of a personhood. Yet amidst the suffering, there is also silliness, insight and raw wit. This work of art feels like a metaphor for what it takes to be a human in this world: it truly encompasses all the things at once.”

—Frances Badalamenti, author of Many Seasons

“Behr’s Animal Kingdom reads like the ultimate mixtape, curated in the alcoves of the human condition and delivered to your headpiece via a beam of light. While singularly meditative, together these stories work to create a unified mosaic of life, loss, heart, and rebirth. Some read like incantations or alchemical recipes, while others drop you directly into the heightened or more subtle music of everyday passion and the quieter spaces that mysteriously hold us together. There is incredible attention to craft and execution here. But more than anything there is love, in all its staggering forms, on every one of these pages.” 

—Jason Arias, author of nostraDAMus 2032

“There are antecedents—PJ Harvey, Molly Shannon, Nan Goldin, Jane Bowles—for the artistry Alex Behr displays in Animal Kingdom, where, like Persephone, she’s fated to travel to the land of the dead, returning with these bristling yet tender stories. Behr’s writing, fact or fiction, is sui generis. If her protagonists are damaged, medicated, and vulnerable, they’re also driven and wily, undaunted by risk or cost.”

—Mary Rechner, author of Marrying Friends

“Perfectly written tales, flush with detail that gives the book the feel of a scrapbook in prose, of the tawdry, the beautiful, the funny, and the unbearably sad.”

—Gregg Turkington, actor/comedian

DEETS

Distribution: Ingram

Pub Date: November 3, 2026

Fiction | 156 pgs

Paperback and eBook | 5.5 x 8.5 in | $21.99 ISBN-979-8-950348-06-8

Publicity: Lori Hettler