Snake: (Object Lessons)

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Feared and worshiped in equal measure, snakes have captured the imagination of poets, painters, and philosophers for centuries. From Ice Age cave drawings to Snakes on a Plane, this creature continues to enthrall the public. But what harm has been caused by our mythologizing? While considering the dangers of stigma, Erica Wright moves from art and pop culture to religion, fetish, and ecologic disaster. This book considers how the snake has become more symbol than animal, a metaphor for how we treat whatever scares us the most, whether or not our panic is justified. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

Table of Contents:
Preface 1. Kingsnakes and Beauty Queens 2. The Problem of the Serpent 3. From Mademoiselle Dorita to Britney Spears: The Snake Charmer Girls 4. A Mouse in Your Teeth 5. Say Amen and Pass the Cottonmouth 6. Python Pocketbooks 7. Who's a Good Boy? 8. Snakes Are Not Cheap: Titanoboa and Other Monsters in the Lake 9. The Hobbyist 10. Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth 11. Magnanimity and True Courage Acknowledgments Notes Index

About the Author :
Erica Wright is a senior editor and the poetry editor at Guernica Magazine. She is the author of six books, most recently All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned (2017) and Famous in Cedarville (2019). Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Paste, New Orleans Review, and BOMB Magazine among other publications.

Review :
Captivating Deeply personal and highly readable…The navigation among such disparate topics, often at a rapid pace, is decidedly easy going, which has to be attributed to Wright's accessible and captivating voice… Snake is full of power, packed with sobering reminders about the human-animal relationship and our responsibility in maintaining it. We give no creature as much cultural meaning as we do the snake, as Erica Wright shows us in this winning tour through history and biology, religion and fear, medicine and fashion. But the real meat of this book is Wright's bright sensibility. What she sees when she writes about snakes includes: environmental and biological apocalypse, the meaning of fear, existential crises trying to sleep through the night in an absolutely dark cave, the complicated sublime, "the grace alongside the fangs…awful and beautiful together.” That's the genius of this book: the self as both instrument and subject. As it turns out, what we talk about when we talk about snakes is ourselves.