Hackenfeller's Ape

A “pointed and amusing satire” (TIME) of animal rights from a trailblazing twentieth-century writer and activist.

At the London Zoo, Professor Clement Derrylhyde has been studying Percy and Edwina, a pair of Hackenfeller’s Apes, for some time: serenading them with Mozart, learning their habits, hoping to witness the mating of this endangered species. Percy observes him back through the bars of his enclosure, wary of a species that is both captor and companion. When the Professor learns that the zoo has sold Percy to a government space program and that the ape is due to be launched on a one-way rocket trip in a matter of days, he teams up with a plucky young lockpick named Gloria in the hopes of securing Percy’s freedom.

In a prescient, provocative novella written almost a decade before the first animal was sent into outer space, Brigid Brophy meditates on the human tendency towards violence and self-alienation. At once fable and comedy, gallivanting heist adventure and elegant philosophical treatise, Hackenfeller’s Ape reveals the human animal inside of us all.

© 2026 Dalkey Archive Press (Ebook): 9781628976748

Release date

Ebook: 13 October 2026