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

Writing on subjects as diverse as the megafires 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 and other magazines beginning in 1974, alongside work published as recently as 2024—showcases the wide-ranging play of Frazier’s imagination. Astute and engaged, he is the supreme chronicler of the everyday, and a unique social and political anthropologist. More than fifty years of keen observation and avid curiosity come together in The Snakes That Ate Florida: wry, humane, and endlessly surprising, this volume once again confirms Frazier as one of the finest (and most delightful) essayists writing today.