No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity

These whimsical meditations from essayist Greene (The Museum of Whales You Will Never See) reflect on the peculiarities of everyday life. One entry recounts the time Green was walking on a perilously steep road in an unnamed town and encountered a man holding a mysterious package who called himself the devil. Another describes how she met a “sorcerer” while traveling, then takes a meta turn as Greene reflects on her literary use of the figure (later revealed to be a museum director with a penchant for fantastical stories) as a metaphor open to readers’ interpretation. Greene’s illustrations, many styled after those of 19th-century naturalists, enrich the essays. For instance, the humorous “Ted Cruz Is a Sentient Bag of Wasps” skewers the Texas senator for changing his stances with the frequency of the insects’ weeks-long life cycle, and marginal line drawings of wasps multiply on each page as the discussion of Cruz’s hypocrisy becomes increasingly damning. Greene has a knack for evocative descriptions—as when she suggests her sister’s basset hound–shar-pei mix is “built like... a claw-foot tub”—and her deliberate withholding of identifying details about the places and people that populate her essays lends them a fablelike quality reminiscent of Kafka and Borges. Every bit as strange and wonderful as the title promises, this delights. Illus. Agent: Duvall Osteen, UTA. (Mar.)