In this exquisite debut short story collection, people with unusual jobs and lives embark on extraordinary journeys. A taboo romance breaks the laws of gravity. Albert Einstein writes letters to the daughter he abandoned. A female physicist meets Stephen Hawking in a bar.... In the closing novella, All Those Stairs, an elevator operator with a genius IQ rides up and down all day enclosed in a metal box. Author Erin Stalcup explores these lives with remarkable compassion, depth, and insight examining loss and longing, and how our bodies and minds can be both weighted and freed. And Yet It...

"Bird as beast. Bird as beauty. Bird as spectacle. In Every Living Species, Stalcup looks zoological impoverishment in the eye and refuses to blink. Instead, she turns loss into an exhibition of World's Fair proportions, concentrating her mad microcosm with biotechnology, infrastructure, art, and humanity. In this world, multiculturalism is as much a revolution as it is a climate change adaptation. In this confluence, I recognize Hitchcock and Hurston, Crichton and KUbler-Ross--and in Stalcup, an aviphile of the highest order." --Lawrence Lenhart, author of The Well-Stocked...