The Snakes That Ate Florida: Reporting, Essays, and Criticism

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.