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Bear by marian engel pages5/28/2023 ![]() ![]() Last year, a screenshot of a Tumblr post about the cover for Bear appeared on the image-sharing site Imgur, and it went viral, with almost a million views. Her hand is raised in a come-hither motion, and her eyes seem to be at once yearning for the reader and warning the reader away. The woman’s hair, improbably, covers the nipples of her naked breasts, even though most laws of anatomy indicate that the nipple of her right breast should almost definitely be revealed. The bear’s fur and the woman’s long hair meld together into a chestnut-colored pool. A menacing bear lurks behind a woman, his beady eyes and triangular claws glinting in the shadows of its fur. ![]() ![]() It is, as promotional materials for a newer edition of the book claim, “ Heavy Metal-inspired," which is to say that it is lurid and shocking and fun, and also aimed directly at the adolescent male gaze. To the left of this paragraph, you’ll see the 1976 book cover for the paperback release of Bear. As you can imagine, this is the sort of premise that probably makes book cover artists lick their lips with anticipation. Let’s lay it out as simply as possible: Marian Engel’s Bear is a novel about a woman who has an erotic relationship with a bear. ![]()
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