No Less Strange or Wonderful: essays in curiosity

Revelatory. . . . Prepare yourself to be dazzled.” —Ben Fountain, author of Devil Makes Three

Named a Best Nonfiction/Science Book of 2025 by Bookpage

Exploding sharks, trees riding bicycles, a Hollywood-esque balloon dress, a giant sloth in costume, a stolen woodpecker, and a sentient bag of wasps—and remember: this is nonfiction.

Celebrated author and artist A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful is a brilliant and generous meditation—on the complex wonder of being alive, on how to pay attention to even the tiniest (sometimes strangest) details that glitter with insight, whimsy, and deep humanity, if only we’d really look. In twenty-six sparkling essays, illuminated through both text and image, Greene is trying to make sense—of anything, really—but especially the things that matter most in life: love, connection, death, grief, the universe, meaning, nothingness, and everythingness. Through a series of encounters with strangers, children, and animals, the wild merges with the domestic; the everyday meets the sublime. Each essay returns readers to our smallest moments and our largest ones in a book that makes us realize—through its exuberant language, its playful curation, and its delightful associative leapfrogging—that they are, in fact, one in the same.