A novel and two poems

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The Elegance of the Hedgehog (L'élégance du hérisson), a novel by Muriel Barbery, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Editions Gallimard, Paris, 2006; Europa Editions, New York, 2008). 

"Two Creatures," a poem by Billy Collins, from his collection Horoscopes for the Dead (Random House, 2011, pp. 53-54), and originally published in Cimarron Review. 

I also really liked much of Collins' poem "Table Talk" (pp. 60-62, originally in The New Yorker), which aptly, for this post, ended with the words "a hedgehog bristling with quills."