“Humans are tuned for relationship...The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils—all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness…Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations. The simple premise of this book is that we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.” 

- David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

"Tesnohlidek’s novel is no fairy tale. It presents a world of not-so-innocent animals living out their short lives in brutal harmony alongside a world of longer-lived humans who are no less brutal, scarcely more intelligent, and a good deal less happy. Neither Tesnohlidek’s animal nor human world is an ideal one, but it is his genius that he is able to lead his readers to an acceptance and final understanding of nature’s grand design, just as he has led his hero, the forester Bartos."

— Robert T. Jones, in a 1985 afterword to The Cunning Little Vixen