Madeline Gressel
A few years ago, while Sunaura Taylor was researching her new book, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, she came across the story of a fox who was born with the same disability that Taylor has—arthrogryposis, a contracture of the joints. A hunter saw the fox and shot it, in what he called a “mercy killing.” But by all indications, the fox was healthy and surviving well. “The concept of a mercy killing carries within it two of the most prominent responses to disability: destruction and pity,” Taylor writes. The anecdote tidily encapsulates Taylor’s domain: the overlap between 
Early on in Emma Donoghue’s new novel The Wonder, our heroine Lib Wright poses a riddle to her young patient Anna: “There’s not a kingdom on the earth, but what I’ve travelled o’er and o’er, and whether it be day or night I neither am nor can be seen.” The answer is the wind, invisible but everywhere, an almost menacing presence. This paradox—between what is and what is seen, what is perceived and what is real—is as good a description as any of the novel’s central preoccupation.