Angelica Lost and Found, By Russell Hoban

Half eagle, half horse, total fun

This is a weird one.

The hippogriff from Girolamo da Carpi's painting of a scene from Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso manages to escape from the picture (which he does by dreaming of a raven and going through its eye into the real world) and sets out to seek the beautiful Angelica, last seen chained to a rock in the painting.

Not only does he find her, living in modern-day San Francisco, he has sex with her, still in hippogriff form, though at times he does also put on human form when the occasion demands. A short, playful novel about art, literature, sex, and psychoanalysis, it doesn't seem to me to have quite the heft of Russell Hoban's earlier works, but it's a lot of fun.