Revelatory. . . . Prepare yourself to be dazzled."―Ben Fountain, author of Devil Makes Three
Named a Best Nonfiction/Science Book of 2025 by Bookpage
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. I entered thinking I understood what Greene would show me, thinking I understood these subjects well, but Greene's words taught me to slow down, taught me to truly look at these subjects, to truly see what I initially neglected.-Colorado Review
It is impossible not to be moved by Greene's essays, all caught up in a miraculous kind of exigency… Asks us to consider the nature of perspective in our daily lives…. The language isn't caged or encased like a fossil, it's conscious and considerate of each passing moment.-Pittsburgh Post Gazette
As with all good essays in the tradition of Montaigne, the seeming focus of Greene's essays is both subject and springboard for meditations on what it means to move through this world, both natural and human-created. Her curiosity leads her to places many writers never arrive.-New Pages
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
Astonishingly imaginative, wise, and weird, the essays in this illustrated collection. . . have the power to reshape the way one sees the world.-Shelf Awareness
Greene has a way of finding meaning in the unlikeliest of subjects.-OC Register, A Most Anticipated Book of 2025
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
