With a bird: A Reader on Avian Kinship by Marjolein van der Loo

Speculative fiction, art, social science and ornithology take flight together in this imaginative reader proposing a multispecies dialogue with birds

Following the runaway success of A Tree, With a Bird, is the second installment in Onomatopee's five-year, five-volume publication series creating "rich encounters between folklore and critical research." As a reader on avian kinship, With a Bird, delves into the profound ways birds have inspired human understanding of life, blending scientific inquiry with spiritual reflection. Visual art, natural history, sociology, literature and more combine to explore how birds challenge and transcend boundaries--between human and non-human life, dream and reality, life and death, science and folklore and the domains of land, water and sky. Each chapter in this petite, canary-yellow paperback is dedicated to the symbolic roles birds play in human life, from death to dreams to freedom to fortune-telling.
In addition to new works and essays, With a Bird, also includes reprinted literary texts on our avian companions by Daisy Hildyard (The Second Body, 2017); John Berger (The White Bird, 1985); Nicholas Mirzoeff (The Whiteness of Birds, 2022); Maria Popova (The New York Times, 2024); Marianne Elisabeth Lien (Ducks into Houses, 2018) and Anna Tsing (The Sociality of Birds, 2022).