The Snakes That Ate Florida: Reporting, Essays, and Criticism

In this substantial yet brisk collection, essayist and humorist Frazier (Paradise Bronx) compiles highlights from his half-century career at the New Yorker and other outlets. The volume opens with a selection of short, humorous dispatches, many of them written for the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” column, that showcase Frazier’s incisive wit, as when he attends a convention of psychiatrists who “glowed with the glow of the well-scheduled.” Next up are Frazier’s longer essays and criticism, including a deep dive into the ancient Mongolian sack of Baghdad (inspired by a throwaway line in an Osama bin Laden video) and ruminations on not one but two invasive Floridian pests: cane toads and Burmese pythons (there are no laws against killing cane toads, which, Frazier writes, “gives them a kind of perverse cool”). Frazier’s heart, when not in the Ohio of his childhood or the New York of his professional life, is in Russia, where he’s spent significant time. (Though he’s not so self-serious that he can’t declare “Yikes!” when dealing with the subject of outsiders who become awkwardly obsessed with Russia.) He often concludes his pieces on thorny, despair-inducing issues with some revivifying if slantwise proposition, as when he suggests that midsize farms, to avoid being gobbled up by corporate agribusiness, try rebranding “to have something crazy-American about them, some kind of ‘gee whiz!’ ” At times laugh-out-loud funny and always perceptive, it’s a rich smorgasbord from a master of his form. (Jan.)