Tanuki Ichiban is a daring and extraordinary tale from novelist Zinaid Meeran. A comic masterpiece, Meeran's genre-busting novel is accomplished and provocative. Geronimo Chanboom and Darius Coochoomber III set out to impress girls at underground dinner parties and strive to smuggle and cook every rare critter in the Cites endangered species roster. Super NGO-ho nymphet, Corsicana, nursing a crush on retired circus orangutan Lahnee-O, spearheads the campaign to have the great apes declared human. Just who is the tanuki ichiban? Next day at work, Corsicana fancied she felt hungover. She had forgotten her third kidney, as her hardass boss at the Institute for the Study of Vice, Prof. Sofie Jasat, called the one point five litre plastic bottle of tapwater Corsicana lugged around with her at all times. No matter that there were fifteen taps in the building to which Corsicana had access, she never got enough water unless the third kidney was at hand. Corsicana eyed Sofie, desk phone tucked between shoulder and ear, sms-ing at pace, screaming for coffee, typing with one hand and bunting a filing cabinet shut with her hip. Corsicana, in secret, called her the Office Octopus. It was a fearful sight -- her future -- Corsicana realised with a jolt. She hoped she could preserve her looks as her monomaniac mentor had. It was a thing of wonder that Sofie, who drank coffee like it was water, ate only Nik-Naks and Peeky Nana's, or Bounty candy bars if she fancied something with fruit in it (syrup-drenched coconut was fruit after all), got hopelessly sozzled at Friday post-work drinks and never slept more than four hours a night, showed her fifty years only through two stripes of silver along her ink black bangs, like Susan Sontag or a highly cerebral polecat.