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Hackenfeller's Ape
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $19.95
ISBN13: 9781628976731
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: Oct 13 2026
Pages: 150
Language: English
A pointed and amusing satire (TIME) of animal rights from a trailblazing twentieth-century writer and activist.
At the London Zoo, Professor Clement Derrylhyde has been studying Percy and Edwina, a pair of Hackenfeller's Apes, for some time: serenading them with Mozart, learning their habits, hoping to witness the mating of this endangered species. Percy observes him back through the bars of his enclosure, wary of a species that is both captor and companion. When the Professor learns that the zoo has sold Percy to a government space program and that the ape is due to be launched on a one-way rocket trip in a matter of days, he teams up with a plucky young lockpick named Gloria in the hopes of securing Percy's freedom.
In a prescient, provocative novella written almost a decade before the first animal was sent into outer space, Brigid Brophy meditates on the human tendency towards violence and self-alienation. At once fable and comedy, gallivanting heist adventure and elegant philosophical treatise, Hackenfeller's Ape reveals the human animal inside of us all.
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