The characters that inhabit Daniel Mueller's stories are all outcasts of different sorts - a struggling poet trying to make ends meet as a stripper; an Aleut girl increasingly dissatisfied with life in an Alaskan salmon factory; an overweight man armed with a remote control, secretly changing channels on neighbor's television sets - yet their stories chronicle a similar effort: the quest to shed their outsider status and seek solace, if not meaning, within the mainstream.

A haunting and evocative exploration of dreams and disillusionment, How Animals Mate delves into the dangerous territories where psyches, pushed to their limits by desire, reveal themselves.