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Micro Book Group Guide No. 3


Tailored to the time-starved readership. No need to organize a group. Pull in a companion only if you want to.


1) Read the passage below. 2) Resolve the subsequent problem. 3) Deal with the rest of your day.


A household’s most recent rescue animal. The overactive attribute of anger suggests an aggravating past. In this house he is calmed. The demonic vocals, vanishingly rare now, and the panicked aggression is virtually retired. A companionable temper emerges. The woman of the house is his favorite. Should she call out the four syllables of his title, he will tend to manifest.

But call him Tell and he will not respond. Telly, no. A cat surviving a tough life may keep the grandiose praenomen. These are the sounds he thinks significant.

The first-time guest of the household will react with surprise when Telemachus strolls into sight. His astonishing girth. That is a good sized cat, a standard understatement. And the demurer guest will only gawp. To boost the awe, inform the witness that they are looking at a cat having shed a fifth of his arrival weight. A rescue animal. He survives a situation where an excess of kibble was the reassuring constant. Venturing to pet him, understand the contract. Only the respectful interspecies touching by the mutable terms that he will specify. He resents a trespass.

He is small for a lion. The regality is not reduced, and the bombastic moniker inscribed on his adoption papers makes up for the missing mane. A stout dwarf lion. A miniature king of the savanna having overeaten enormously and now he is sated. The basic temperament is deeply mellow in his bettered chapter. The cautionary gestures, only as necessary. The correctional signals, few and restrained. An essential decency. A commitment to the common wellbeing. He has learned to expect what he can reciprocate.


(From Outpatient, a novel in the works by Naama Goldstein)


Complete the following statement:

The literature I just read leaves me…


1) Heartened by a feline character’s improving mental health.

2) Sensing the parallels between my context and that of beings of other species. Inclined to imagine that my own life’s movements tie into the universal animal struggle.

3) All of the above.

4) None of the above. I am not a cat person. I am tending hostile or anxious.

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