Joe Woodward, at Poets and Writers, explores the narrated-by-critters genre, which (he notes) started with George Orwell’s Animal Farm and in the past few years has grown to include Timbuktu, by Paul Auster; Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, by Sigrid Nunez; and The Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.

Woodward then goes on to review this year’s newest additions, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, Verlyn Klinkenborg (February, Knopf) and Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, Sam Savage (next month, Coffee House Press).

The article doesn’t mention Paul Gallico’s The Silent Miaow. But that was, strictly speaking, non-fiction, insofar as it was a how-to manual for stray cats. So the oversight is understandable.