Pepsi Bears and Other Stories

Daring and provocative short stories from one of Australia’s best comic writers.

A collection of fables in which the intuition of animals is set against the hubris of man, Anson Cameron is part court jester, part acclaimed writer of short stories and novels, and part national conscience.

A cola company uses the last wild polar bears as billboards. A boy is forced to compose poems for ats. A dog starts a race-riot. A zebra shames two armies. A zoologist vivisects a gorilla to disprove evolution and has his own brain placed in the ape’s head. In New Guinea Zookeepers eat their exhibits. In Gippsland the face of The Lord appears on dairy cows. In the Western Desert mummified egg-bandits hang from trees...

By these incidents the Nature of Man is compellingly exposed. And the many and varied species of Mother Earth are wry spectators as Man pilots the planet he thinks he owns into the wall of oblivion.

What the critics say about Anson Cameron:

‘...one of the most interesting writers of his generation... has an imaginative largesse and sentence-by-sentence articulation that soars above the pack’ -- Peter Craven, The Australian

‘...prose that fizzes with energy and humour, leaping from the scatalogical to the lyrical, from the earthy to the sublime’ -- The Adelaide Advertiser

‘Cameron writes a tough, gutsy story that is so well crafted you know there’s someone behind the wheel from the word go’ -- The Age