No Less Strange or Wonderful
Essays
by A. Kendra Greene
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Pub Date Mar 04 2025 | Archive Date Feb 28 2025
Tin House | Tin House Books
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Description
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.
About the Author: 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.
Advance Praise
"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’d follow A. Kendra Greene’s writing anywhere—that’s how confident, how surprising, how crafty it is. She is truly one of the most delightful essayists in the game, which is reconfirmed within the first few pages of this bold new collection. What a joy to never know where an essayist of this caliber might take you next: to the zoo, to a balloon-twisting convention, to a tony Dallas Christmas party with its own bespoke Scrooge. You also might get taken to ontological places, emotional spaces, and other spots impossible to pinpoint on a map. Carry this fine book in your handbag, your knapsack, your marsupial pouch, and crack it open when you want to be transported." -Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses
"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
"A. Kendra Greene’s newest essay collection is equal parts joy and surprise. The devil visits a bookstore. A dress made from balloons withers instead of pops. There are badgers with human hands, smells in the attic named Mortimer, a purloined bird specimen whose thief writes to say it’s doing just fine. And we read along, caught up as much in Greene’s language as we are in her knack for finding wisdom in the world’s smallest mysteries, its hidden delights." -Sarah Viren, author of To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781963108088 |
| PRICE | $28.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 272 |
