Frog

In “Frog”, Anne Fadiman returns to her favorite genre, the essay, of which she is one of our most celebrated practitioners. Ranging in subject matter from her deceased frog, to archaic printer technology, to the fraught relationship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his son Hartley, these essays unlock a whole world—one both mundane and mysterious—through sly observation and brilliant wit. The diverse subjects of “Frog” are bound together by the quality of Fadiman’s attention, and subtly, they come to form a slantwise portrait of the artist, a writer dedicated to chronicling the world as it changes around her, in ways small and large.