HOW WE ARE HUNGRY

Look carefully at the black, dust-jacketless cover of Dave Eggers's mixed bag of a short-story collection, How We Are Hungry, and you'll see the engraved image of a gryphon, the mythological animal with the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle. It's the sort of thing that barely registers before you've begun reading. But after you've turned the last page and closed the book, there it is again -- and suddenly this hybrid beast, famed as much for its vigilant nest-tending as for its love of gold, seems a particularly apt symbol for the other unusual creatures about whom you've just read. Animals, especially imperiled animals, make ominous cameos in nearly all of these stories. There's the wounded anteater who crashes the hotel room of two old friends, both of whom seem willing to sacrifice their friendship for a few nights of banal, artificial romance. There are the thousands of cows whose imprisonment in a beef-processing plant haunts a young man, himself imprisoned by a relative'sblithe and repeated attempts at suicide. There's the sheep struck and killed on the road by a driver rendered temporarily insane with unfocused, diabolical jealousy. And in the last and most curious story, there's a chatty talking dog named Steven, who narrowly survives being thrown in a river and commits the remainder of his spared life to running, eating and playing with maximum gusto.