The Snakes That Ate Florida. Reporting, Essays, and Criticism - Ian Frazier

Selected pieces on nature, history, politics, and urban culture from a master of the nonfiction narrative.

Writing on subjects as divergent as the mega-fires that burned the grasslands of the Great Plains in 2018, the tragic secret life of the manufacturer of maraschino cherries, the world’s largest beaver dam, and the invasive Burmese pythons of the Florida Everglades, Ian Frazier captures the multiplicity, the strangeness, and the wonder of contemporary life.

This collection of pieces—consisting of features and reportage for The New Yorker beginning in 1970, articles on topics such as COVID and rereading Lolita fifty years later, and work published in the last year—showcases the wide-ranging play of Frazier’s imagination. Astute and engaged, he is the supreme chronicler of the everyday, a kind of social and political anthropologist. Fifty years of keen observation and irrepressible curiosity come together in The Snakes That Ate Florida, establishing Frazier as nothing less than the greatest practitioner of the form.

"Understated and eclectic, Mr. Frazier’s essays have adorned American magazines for more than 50 years. In
the dozens of articles reprinted here, intimate profiles appear alongside ecological essays, literary criticism and travel writing, all of them laced with astute geopolitical insights: Americans, for instance, are an intentionally funny people, while Germans and Frenchmen 'can be funny only unintentionally.' Russian humor, meanwhile, 'is slapstick, only you actually die.'" —Luke Lyman, The Wall Street Journal

"Frazier was born to be a magazine writer, quick to discern between a meaningful vignette and a subject for a long-form story. Here he gathers examples of both . . . a greatest-hits collection." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"A rich smorgasbord from a master of his form." —Publishers Weekly, starred review