Why You'll Love This
A Pulitzer winner imagines the trial of humanity — judged by the animals we left behind.
- Great if you want: a fable that asks whether humans deserve mercy
- The experience: brief, haunting, and quietly devastating — reads in one sitting
- The writing: Smiley keeps it tender and restrained, which makes it hit harder
- Skip if: at 16 pages, you want narrative depth over parable
About This Book
In a world where humanity has finally exhausted its welcome, the animals have taken charge — and they are not feeling charitable. Jane Smiley's compact fable imagines an Earth in the aftermath of human ruin, where a Congress of Animals debates whether any person deserves to survive. Into this reckoning steps a young mare with an unlikely attachment to one quiet human on a hillside, and a dangerous desire to argue for mercy. The stakes are nothing less than extinction, but the emotional center is something more intimate: the question of whether compassion can survive in a world that has every reason to abandon it.
At just sixteen pages, The Hillside earns its brevity. Smiley writes with the compression and moral weight of a classic fable, but the voice is unmistakably her own — warm, precise, and quietly subversive. The animal perspective never tips into whimsy; it carries genuine gravity. Part of the seven-story Warmer collection, this piece stands on its own as a small, unsettling meditation on mercy, accountability, and what gets lost when righteousness goes unchecked. It rewards slow reading.