Part suicide note, part therapy session, and part field notes for the end of the world, Patrick Lawler's unforgettable Conversations with Extinct Animals is a meditation on the absence of twenty-four extinct animals—the Auroch, the Dodo, the Great Auk, the Bali Tiger, the Caribbean Monk Seal, and others sequenced by the dates they perished. Lawler’s conjuring of these lost species and their troubled human counterparts bears witness to the largesse of the world and a human's struggle to re-mystify it.