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Essays
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.
"Whimsical...Every bit as strange and wonderful as the title promises, this delights." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Greene brings ebullient inquisitiveness to 26 illustrated essays on matters human and animal, mundane and metaphysical...With deftness and grace, she draws connections and meaning from her fresh take on a vibrant universe. A delightful collection." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Intricately considered (and remarkably intimate)...It is impossible not to be intrigued and beguiled." ―Booklist
"No Less Strange or Wonderful doesn't so much live up to its title as explode out of it. What the amazing A. Kendra Greene makes of the world, what she makes with the world, is unfailingly wondrous and revelatory, whether her subject is the Santa Barbara Zoo giraffe, balloon-twisting royalty, the dog that became a speck, Ebenezer Scrooge, or the manifold metaphor of Senator Ted Cruz as a sentient bag of wasps. Prepare yourself to be dazzled by this most original of writers." ―Ben Fountain, author of Devil Makes Three
"I am so taken with A. Kendra Greene's takenness with things―funny-looking dogs, delighted devils, monotremes, the toes of the Universe, beautiful frozen toilet water. Her intoxicating book does the opposite of diminishing the world, and it took me to new places. Like a train that spurns conventional stations, conventional tracks, this book plunges into the wild, trackless unknown." ―Amy Leach, author of The Everybody Ensemble
This information about No Less Strange or Wonderful was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: © Space Giraffe Studios
A. Kendra Greene is a writer and book artist. She is the author and illustrator of The Museum of Whales You Will Never See. Her work has come into being with fellowships from Fulbright, MacDowell, Yaddo, Dobie Paisano, and the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard.
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