Insectopedia »

HUGH RAFFLES teaches anthropology at The New School. He is the author of In Amazonia: A Natural History, which received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. His essays have been published in Best American Essays, Granta, and Orion. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2009. He lives in New York City.

http://insectopedia.org/

A stunningly original exploration of the ties that bind us to the beautiful, ancient, astoundingly accomplished, largely unknown, and unfathomably different species with whom we share the world.
 
For as long as humans have existed, insects have existed, too. Wherever we’ve traveled, they’ve traveled, too. Yet we hardly know them, not even the ones we’re closest to: those that eat our food, share our beds, and live in our homes.
 
Organizing his book alphabetically with one entry for each letter, weaving together brief vignettes, meditations, and extended essays, Hugh Raffles embarks on a mesmerizing exploration of history and science, anthropology and travel, economics, philosophy, and popular culture to show us how insects have triggered our obsessions, stirred our passions, and beguiled our imaginations.
 
Raffles offers us a glimpse into the high-stakes world of Chinese cricket fighting, the deceptive courtship rites of the dance fly, the intriguing possibilities of queer insect sex, the vital and vicious role locusts play in the famines of west Africa, how beetles deformed by Chernobyl inspired art, and how our desire and disgust for insects has prompted our own aberrant behavior.
 
Deftly fusing the literary and the scientific, Hugh Raffles has given us an essential book of reference that is also a fascination of the highest order.

http://insectopedia.org/

The New York Times Book Review - Katherine Bouton

"The minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world." This is both Hugh Raffles's epigraph and the last line of his miraculous book Insectopedia, as inventive and wide ranging and full of astonishing surprises as the vast insect world itself. In 26 chapters varying from 2 to 42 pages, from "Air" to "Zen" and "The Art of ZZZs," with "Chernobyl," "Fever/Dream," "Kafka," "Sex," "The Sound of Global Warming" and "Ex Libris, Exempla" in between, he takes us on a delirious journey, zooming in and out from the microscopic to the global, from the titillating to the profound, from Niger to China, from one square mile above Louisiana to the recesses of his own mind.