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"And a man is a pure human being only in the first ten years. Ten years old and you start to live your animal years." Humans, according to the Grandfather in Yiyun Li’s “The Ground Floor,” were originally granted a lifespan of ten years, but wept so piteously when God would not give us more, that one hundred animals went to the palace of God and each offered a year of their own for Man. Whether that means we are living on borrowed time, or we should reconsider the ways we now impact our fellow creatures, or each year after ten is somehow influenced by a different animal spirit, it’s a notion I find both remarkable and heartbreaking. This book grapples with the magnitude of those one hundred gifts.

The text of The Animal Years is adapted from Yiyun Li's "The Ground Floor," as it appeared in The Iowa Review. Printed in hand-set Spectrum types at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. Stonehenge paper accordion with abaca and cotton papers hand-made by Bird & Greene. The printing, binding, and 100 Sumi ink drawings are the work of A. Kendra Greene, who is humbled by the 12 page essay that offered one of its paragraphs for the life of this book.