The Inexplicable Omission of Ian Frazier’s “Hogs Wild” from The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2016”

I see the editors of The New York Times Book Review have selected their “100 Notable Books of 2016.” It’s a fine list, except for one whopping flaw – the inexplicable omission of Ian Frazier’s brilliant collection of New Yorker reporting pieces, Hogs Wild. Frazier is one of the all-time great literary journalists – in a class with A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, and John McPhee. Hogs Wild is his richest collection. It should not only be in the Top 100; it should be in the Top 10. The Times’ failure to include it on its list is baffling.

Notes on Ian Frazier's "Hogs Wild" - Part IV

Hogs Wild’s title piece is about the wild hog infestation in the American South. Frazier reports that the South is “wild-hog-positive from the Rio Grande in West Texas to the Coast of the Carolinas, with only a few counties still hog-free.” Describing the damage that wild hogs cause, he launches this remarkable construction:

Next question: What do wild hogs do that’s so bad?

Oh, not much. They just eat the eggs of the sea turtle, an endangered species, on barrier islands off the East Coast, and root up rare and diverse species of plants all over, and contribute to the replacement of those plants by weedy, invasive species, and promote erosion, and undermine roadbeds and bridges with their rooting, and push expensive horses away from food stations in pastures in Georgia, and inflict tusk marks on the legs of these horses, and eat eggs of game birds like quail and grouse, and run off game species like deer and wild turkeys, and eat food plots planted specially for those animals, and root up the hurricane levee in Bayou Sauvage, Louisiana, that kept Lake Pontchartrain from flooding the eastern part of New Orleans, and chase a woman in Itasca, Texas, and root up lawns of condominiums in Silicon Valley, and kill lambs and calves, and eat them so thoroughly that no evidence of the attack can be found.

And eat red-cheeked salamanders and short-tailed shrews and red-back voles and other dwellers in the leaf litter in the Great Smoky Mountains, and destroy a yard that had previously won two “Yard of the Month” awards on Robins Air Force Base, in central Georgia, and knock over glass patio tables in suburban Houston, and muddy pristine brook-trout streams by wallowing in them, and play hell with native flora and fauna in Hawaii, and contribute to the near-extinction of the island fox on Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California, and root up American Indian historic sites and burial grounds, and root up a replanting of native vegetation along the banks of the Sacramento River, and root up peanut fields in Georgia, and root up sweet-potato fields in Texas, and dig big holes by rooting in wheat fields irrigated by motorized central-pivot irrigation pipes, and, as the nine-hundred-foot-long pipe advances automatically on its wheeled supports, one set of wheels hangs up in a hog-rooted hole, and meanwhile the rest of the pipe keeps on going and begins to pivot around the stuck wheels, and it continues and continues on its hog-altered course until the whole seventy-five-thousand-dollar system is hopelessly pretzeled and ruined.

This audacious, vivid, delightful passage contains a number of Frazier’s signature moves: the humor of that “Oh, not much,” followed by a proliferation of seemingly endless instances of eye-opening, hog-wild destruction; the incredible specificity of the imagery (not just a yard, but a “a yard that had previously won two ‘Yard of the Month’ awards on Robins Air Force Base, in central Georgia”; not just fields, but “wheat fields irrigated by motorized central-pivot irrigation pipes”; the convoy of “ands” (forty of them, no less). What I relish is the way the function of those “ands” changes in the final ten lines from linking examples of wild-hog damage to linking a disastrous sequence of events that starts with wild hogs digging big holes by rooting in wheat fields irrigated by motorized central-pivot irrigation pipes and ends six “ands” later with the whole seventy-five-thousand-dollar irrigation system “hopelessly pretzeled and ruined.” The entire ingenious creation enacts the wildness of its subject.

Notes on Ian Frazier's "Hogs Wild" - Part III

Ian Frazier is a consummate writer of figurative speech. I’ve pointed this out before (see “Ian Frazier: The Art of Figuration”). Here, from Hogs Wild, are seven examples of his figurative art:

1. Snow had fallen the night before, re-burdening the trees all the way to the crest of the Swans, whose topmost spruces and pines stood minutely whitened against the sky like fine-edged crystals of frost on a windowpane. [“By the Road”]

2. As usual when there are no clouds over the city, the high, white streaks of jet trails stretched like chalk smears across a blackboard. [“Back to the Harbor”]

3. Beneath the chinaberries their little purple blossoms lay on the gray mud like a pattern on an old dress, sometimes with hog tracks squished in between. [“Hogs Wild”]

4. Seen from miles away on the interstate, the crater suggests a giant bullet hole in the surrounding flatness, with rock lifted and folded back around its edges like curled metal around a puncture in a shot-through stop sign. [“On Impact”]

5. Last summer I was driving along the river in western Illinois thinking how horrible the Mississippi had been lately, with its outsized floods and its destruction of New Orleans, and I noted the recent flooding still in progress along the Illinois shore—the miles of roads and fields submerged, and the ferry landing at Golden Eagle, Illinois, now separated from dry land by seventy feet of mud and water, and low-lying parking lots full of river mud cracked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle curling in the sun. [“Fish Out of Water”]

6. I watched Barack Obama’s speech, closed-captioned above the painfully percussive music, on ceiling TV monitors through a writhing forest of dancers on poles. [“The Rap”]

7. Uncheerful interior, and an air of many people having recently passed through; the floors were like the insides of old suitcases, with forgotten small things in the corners. [“Hidden City”]

Frazier is known for his lists. Hogs Wild contains a dandy:

The B46 passes EZ Pawn Corp., Baby Genius Day Care Center, Miracle Temple Church of God, Cameo Auto Body, Victory Tabernacle of Praise, Tree Stump Barber Shop, Beulah Church of God Seventh Day, Inc., the Lingerie Zone, Sinister Ink Tattoo & Piercing, Brooklyn for Jesus 7th Day Adventist, Rag Top Lounge, Holy Order of Cherubim and Seraphim Movement Church, Grace Church of the Firstborn, Bobby’s Dept. Store, Sneaker King, Saint Jude Religious Items, Tropical Breeze Car Wash, First United Church of Jesus Christ Apostolic, Inc., Yahya Hardware & Discount Store, Plain Truth Temple of Praise, Sunny Corner Restaurant, King Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church, 3-Star Juice Lounge, Eglise de Dieu, Asian Yummy House, Byways and Hedges Youth for Christ Ministry, Pawn Rite, and New Hope Healing Series (Space Available for Worship). [“Bus Ride”]

Frazier is a superb describer. Here, from his brilliant “Blue Bloods,” a report on the decline of one of the earth’s oldest living creatures, the horseshoe crab, is his depiction of throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs on the riprap wall near the Dover Air Force Base fuel dock on Delaware Bay:

The crumbling brittle of horseshoe-crab parts under the car wheels now became so thick it was unnerving, with uncrushed, whole horseshoe crabs all over the road as well. I pulled onto the left-hand berm to investigate. When I climbed up on the riprap wall, I saw throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks. The carnage stretched into the distance and had a major-battlefield air, reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg. Some of the horseshoe crabs seemed to be moving feebly. The ones on the road had evidently managed to make it past the rocks.

My favorite sentence in Hogs Wild: “All the park benches had blankets of snow pulled up over their knees.” [“Back to the Harbor”]

My favorite detail: the bird-watchers’ birdcall ringtones in the wonderful “Blue Bloods”:  “Some of the bird-watchers were talking on their cell phones and leaving excited messages for other bird-watchers. When the other bird-watchers called back, the ring tones were birdcalls.”

My second favorite detail: the type of fly Frazier used to catch his first steelhead: “Joe tells me where to put the fly – a pattern called the Green Butt Skunk – and I begin to cast” (“The One That Got Away”).

My third favorite detail: the shirt location of Professor David M. Lodge’s pen and mechanical pencil: “He wore a yellow tennis shirt with his ballpoint pen and mechanical pencil stuck neatly in the button part of the neck, an innovation I admired, because I was wearing the same kind of shirt and had compensated for its lack of breast pocket by putting my pens in my pants pockets, always an awkward deal” (“Fish Out of Water”).

In his Introduction to Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts (2013), Frazier says of Malcolm, “Over and over she has demonstrated that nonfiction – a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see everyday – can rise to the highest level of literature.” In my opinion, the same can be said about Frazier. 

Notes on Ian Frazier's "Hogs Wild" - Part II

Ian Frazier’s great new collection Hogs Wild consists of twenty-three reporting pieces, eighteen of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. I remember reading the New Yorker articles when they appeared in the magazine. They’re among the glories of New Yorker reportage – in the same league as work by A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, and John McPhee.

However, in this post, I want to focus on one of Hogs Wild’s five non-New Yorker pieces – “The One That Got Away” – which is new to me. It’s an elegy for a forty-eight-year-old fishing guide named Joseph Adam Randolph, also known as Stealhead Joe. Frazier writes, “The misspelling of his self-bestowed moniker was intentional. If he didn’t actually steal fish, he came close, and he wanted people to hear echoes of the trickster and the outlaw in his name.” Stealhead Joe was a guide on Oregon’s Deschutes River; he specialized in catching sea-run fish called steelhead. On or about November 4, 2012, he drove his truck to a gravel pit, parked, ran a hose from the exhaust pipe to the cab, and asphyxiated himself. Two months earlier, Frazier had spent six days fishing with him on the Deschutes. Frazier says he planned to write a profile of him for Outside magazine.

“The One That Got Away” contains a couple of memorable scenes. One is a description of Frazier wading in the Deschutes for the first time:

An hour after we met, we waded out into the middle of the Deschutes in a long, straight stretch above town. The wading freaked me out, and I was frankly holding on to Joe. He was six-five, broad shouldered, with a slim, long-waisted swimmer’s body. I wore chest waders, and Joe had put on his waders, too, in deference to the colder water. I held tightly to his wader belt. Close up, I smelled the Marlboro smell. When I was a boy, many adults, and almost all adult places and pastimes, smelled of cigarettes. Joe had the same tobacco-smoke aroma I remembered from dads of fifty years ago. I relaxed slightly; I might have been ten years old. Joe held my hand.

The other passage that sticks in my mind isn’t really a scene; it’s a blunt (for Frazier) expression of philosophy:

The paths along the river that have been made by anglers’ feet are well worn and wide. Many who come to fish the Deschutes are driven by a deep, almost desperate need. So much of the world is bullshit. This river is not.

“The One That Got Away” is a significant piece in Frazier's oeuvre. Stealhead Joe is one of his most memorable “characters.”

Postscript: The Outside version of “The One That Got Away,” including some excellent photos of Stealhead Joe, can be found here. 

Ian Frazier's "Hogs Wild" - Baggy Masterpiece?

I see in The New York Times that Carl Rotella, reviewing Ian Frazier’s Hogs Wild, says that Frazier “tends to leave things a little baggy.” I’m not sure what he means, but it doesn’t sound attractive. As a description of clothes, “baggy” indicates loose and hanging in folds. As a description of eyes, it denotes folds of puffy skin below them. As a description of writing, it means … what? Loosely constructed? Voluminous? Inflated with inessential elements? These aren’t valid descriptions of Frazier’s work. Rotella also says,

Frazier doesn’t insist on a perfect roundedness of form in his essays. Rather than arranging every last element for maximum thematic coherence and effect, he’ll leave in a moment, a scene, seemingly for the hell of it. Do we need to see Jansen trying to find his Volvo in an airport garage by homing in on the sound of his wool-­colored dog barking from inside it? Is it absolutely necessary, in order to understand there are relatively few outward signs of the opioid crisis, to wander around Staten Island and note an ice cream truck playing “I Can’t Stop Loving You”?

Well, speaking for myself, I don’t need to see these things, but I enjoy seeing them. Frazier’s inclusion of incidental experiences, stuff that most writers omit, is one of his maker’s marks. For instance, in his great “Form and Fungus” (in Hogs Wild), about the invention of an all-natural substitute for Styrofoam, there’s a part in which he’s on his way to visit the Ecovative company in Green Island, New York, and he stops at an abandoned railroad bridge that crosses a branch of the Mohawk River. This digression produces one of the piece’s most delightful passages:

All river confluences are glorious. Canoes full of Iroquois Indians travelled past here, and fur traders, and soldiers, and surveyors for the Erie Canal. The canal turned left near this point, followed the Mohawk’s shale valley westward, tapped into the Great Lakes, and made the fortune of New York City. Here, as at all confluences, wildlife congregates. In the early morning, it’s an amphitheatre of birdsong, while Canada geese add their usual commotion. So many crows show up in the evenings that they plague the town of Green Island, and the mayor has to scare them away with a blank pistol.

That last line about the crows and the mayor and the blank pistol makes me smile every time I read it. There’s nothing baggy about it. It’s a wonderful evocation of the river. Frazier makes its inclusion seem the most natural thing in the world.

Here’s another example. In Frazier’s superb “The March of the Strandbeests” (also in Hogs Wild), an account of his visit to Scheveningen, in the Netherlands, to observe beach trials of Theo Jansen’s walking Strandbeests, there’s a day of rain when nothing is happening at the beach, so Frazier hops a train to Amsterdam and visits the Rijksmuseum, where, in a small room, “not part of the Greatest Hits,” he finds an “unassuming show of landscapes on paper.” Frazier writes,

People were passing through it without stopping. I ducked in and took a breath. The show, “Dunes: Holland’s Wilderness,” was about the shore where I’d just been. The introductory label said, “Holland’s landscape is man-made. Only the sands and the dunes along the coast are more or less nature’s creation. They are our natural defense against the sea. . . . The earliest known drawings of Holland’s landscape are views of the dunes near Haarlem recorded by Hendrick Goltzius around 1600. Many landscape specialists followed in his footsteps. . . . Their work shows the wide, endless space, the quiet and the wildness.”

All the drawings were sketchbook size, done in pencil, ink, or black chalk. If the giant Rembrandt in the adjoining room was jet-engine powerful, his little horizontal sketch here, of a shore landscape, was moving for its simplicity and self-effacement. Some of the dune sketches showed the blades of windmills against the sky; the main purpose of Dutch windmills wasn’t so much to mill anything as to pump the incoming sea back out. A Jacob van Ruisdael sketch with a heavy shading of cloud in one corner showed more clearly the same quality of torque that his paintings often have. In a vitrine, a leather-bound sketchbook of Gerard ter Borch the younger lay open to a black-chalk drawing of a tangled patch of brush on a hillside. Such a no-count, lovely piece of ground! The drawing dated from 1634, though it could have been done in the Scheveningen dunes, or maybe West Texas, just last week.

Such a no-count, lovely piece of ground! I love that line. It’s an epiphany. It perfectly expresses a key element of Frazier’s governing aesthetic – his eye for the overlooked and the disregarded. We wouldn’t have the benefit of this sudden insight, except that Frazier decided to take a side-trip to the Rijksmuseum and to write up his experience and include it in his piece on the Strandbeests. Does Frazier’s digression make his piece “baggy”? Not in the eyes of this beholder. It makes it a great essay. Adam Phillips, in his Side Effects (2006), says, “The literary essay as a form – at least from the early nineteenth century onwards – has not only allowed for the artfulness, the interest of digression, but has also positively encouraged it.” I rest may case.

Postscript: There’s one sense, of course, in which Frazier is a baggy writer. He’s obsessed with bags in trees. See his classic “Bags in Trees” trilogy (in his 2005 collection Gone to New York) and his recent "The Bag Bill" (The New Yorker, May 2, 2016). But clearly this isn’t what Rotella is referring to.  

Notes on Ian Frazier's "Hogs Wild" - Part I

I’m still making my way through Ian Frazier’s great new reporting collection Hogs Wild, savoring each piece, trying to get at the ingredients that make Frazier’s writing such a pleasure for me. I’m reading the pieces in the order they appear in the book. I’ve just finished “On Impact,” which is approximately midway. I suppose I could wait and post my impressions of Hogs Wild after I’ve finished it. But I find the urge to post a few preliminary notes irresistible. Here then, in no particular order, are some of my early responses to this rich wonderful book.

1. In “Hungry Minds,” Frazier says of the Church of the Holy Apostles soup kitchen,

I know about the soup kitchen because I am one of the teachers of a writers’ workshop that meets there after lunch on Wednesdays in the spring. I started the workshop fourteen years ago, with the help of a grant. I wanted to do something with the soup kitchen because I admired the people there and the way it is run and the whole idea of it. There are so many hungers out there; the soup kitchen deals, efficiently and satisfyingly, with the most basic kind. I consider it, in its own fashion, a work of art.

I consider it, in its own fashion, a work of art. Right there, I think, is a glimpse of Frazier’s distinctive way of seeing. How many of us would approach a soup kitchen as a work of art? Probably not many. It seems to me that this is the way Frazier views many of the wildly differing organizations and events that he covers in Hogs Wild, whether it's a Big Read on Staten Island billed as “Race Issues in Mark Twain: A Community Dialogue on Language & Dialect in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn” (“Word”), a seal-watching cruise in New York City harbor (“Back to the Harbor”), Burt Swersey’s Inventor’s Studio class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (“Form and Fungus”), the Ocmulgee Wild Hog Festival in Abbeville, Georgia (“Hogs Wild”), or the Nageswarans’ “meteorite” exhibit at Rutgers University Geology Museum (“On Inpact”).

That doesn’t mean that Frazier aestheticizes or dramatizes or, in any sense, transforms these events. His art is painstakingly factual. He reports what he sees (“Their bundles are tied together with yellow nylon rope, cinched with bungee cords, taped with silver duct tape, or packed loose in double or triple plastic shopping bags”), smells (“The smell of that room leans you back against a hayrick on an autumn afternoon”), hears (“That part of Staten Island is a New World symphony, though, with the bridge humming above, and the tall towers holding up their roadway span like a great gate, and tanker ships anchored at different angles in the Harbor, and the tidal currents colliding”), and imagines (“I imagined a dotted line extending from the shattered tile on the floor and through the hole, out the roof, across the blank blue vista in the skylight, and onward and outward, incalculably far”).

Frazier’s approach is intensely personal. John Updike’s brilliant phrase “subjective specifics” comes to mind. Updike was describing Czeslaw Milosz’s essays (see "Survivor/Believer," The New Yorker, December 24, 2001). I think the phrase applies to Frazier’s writing, too.

2. Rivers are among the many reasons I read Frazier. Recall his magnificent list of rivers in Great Plains (“Among the rivers of the Great Plains are the Cimaron, the Red, the Brazos, the Purgatoire, the Trinity, the Big Sandy, the Canadian, the Smoky Hill, the Soloman, the Republican, the Arikaree, the Frenchman, the Little Blue, the Big Blue, the South Platte, the North Palatte, the Laramie, the Loup, the Niobrara, the White Earth, the Cheyenne, the Owl, the Grand, the Cannonball, the Heart, the Knife, the Little Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Powder, the Tongue, the Bighorn, the Musselshell, the Judith, the Marias, the Milk, the Missouri”). In the first fourteen pieces of Hogs Wild, at least fifteen rivers are mentioned: the Flathead, the Deschutes, the Hudson, the Mohawk, the Savannah, the Ocmulgee, the Illinois, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Tennessee, the Ohio, the Des Moines, the Wabash, the Pere Marquette, and the Manistee.

In one of the most memorable lines in Hogs Wild, Frazier says of the Deschutes, “So much of the world is bullshit. This river is not” (“The One That Got Away”).

My favorite Hogs Wild river reference occurs in “Form and Fungus,” a fascinating story about the invention of an all-natural substitute for Styrofoam. Near the end of the piece, Frazier writes,

Whenever I visit the company, I like to stop first at an abandoned railroad bridge at the north end of Green Island. The branch of the Mohawk that the bridge spans has carved low bluffs from the island’s four-hundred-million-year-old shale. The bluffs resemble stacks of very thin, reddish-black crêpes. All river confluences are glorious. Canoes full of Iroquois Indians travelled past here, and fur traders, and soldiers, and surveyors for the Erie Canal. The canal turned left near this point, followed the Mohawk’s shale valley westward, tapped into the Great Lakes, and made the fortune of New York City. Here, as at all confluences, wildlife congregates. In the early morning, it’s an amphitheatre of birdsong, while Canada geese add their usual commotion. So many crows show up in the evenings that they plague the town of Green Island, and the mayor has to scare them away with a blank pistol.

I love that passage. The stop at an abandoned railroad bridge, the reference to the canoes full of Iroquois, the “amphitheatre of birdsong,” the mayor scaring away the crows with a blank pistol, and that fervent assertion, “All river confluences are glorious” – it’s quintessential Frazier! I eat it up.

3. Hogs Wild teems with interesting people. They divide into two broad categories – experts and officials that Frazier interviews and ordinary folks that he encounters in the course of his explorations. There are no celebrities, powerbrokers, or oligarchs. This is one of the many reasons I admire Frazier’s writing.

Here are the names of some of the people who populate the first half of Hogs Wild: Bob Blaisdell, Susan Shapiro, Foster Thayer, Father Rand Frew, William Greenlaw, Wendy Shepherd, Clyde Kuemmerle, Harold McKnight, Prince McKnight, Jacqueline McKnight, Rodney Williams, Olimpo Tlatelpa, Linda Adams, Joe Randolph (“Stealhead Joe”), John Hazel, Diane Daviscourt, Alex Gonsiewski, Marianne Kent-Stoll, Beth Gorrie, Virginia Allen, Carolyn Daley, Millissa Myers, Paul Sieswerda, William Zantzinger, Hattie Carroll, Reverend Dr. Theodore C. Jackson, Jr., Dorothy Johnson, Mildred Jessup, Bobby Phelps, Gavin McIntyre, Eben Bayer, Burt Swersey, Sue Van Hook, Henry Shrapnel, Shelley Stiaes, Joe Corn, John J. Mayer, Robbie Edalgo, Bob Addison, Srini Nageswaran, Lieutenant Robert A. Brightman, Louis Detofsky, Jeremy Delaney, Gary Weinstein, and Joe Boesenberg.

Frazier’s descriptions of some of these people make me smile. For example, in “Hogs Wild,” he says of Joe Corn, a senior wildlife biologist who has trapped and studied thousands of wild hogs,

Joe Corn is tall and lean, in his late forties, with curly dark hair and blue eyes that sometimes betray an unscientific amusement at the hogginess of wild hogs. For example, he was describing a type of wire pen used in trapping hogs, and he said that the pen had no ceiling and was of a height that one could lean over and look down at the hogs; but, he added, one should never do that. I asked why, and he said, “Because they’ll jump up and bite your face.” And that look—amusement combined with a sort of admiration—lit his eyes.

Now I’m going to say something here that I hope doesn’t sound too cornball. I believe that Frazier, in naming as many people as he does in his pieces, is consciously rescuing them from oblivion – the oblivion that surely awaits us all. As a master writer, a writer of works that will endure so long as there are eyes to read them, he has the power to do that. My belief is based on the slenderest evidence. In “A Lonesome Death Remembered,” an exploration of the sources of Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” Frazier writes, “Dylan’s poetry has caused Hattie Carroll’s name, and the sorrow and true lonesomeness of her death, to stick in people’s minds.” And at the end of the piece, he says, “And if it weren’t for Dylan, nothing more would have been said about Hattie Carroll.” Frazier is aware of art’s preservative effect. Thanks to Frazier’s art, Joe Corn, Virginia Allen, Burt Swersey, Sue Van Hook, Stealhead Joe, et al. won’t disappear; they’ll live on in his splendid reporting pieces.

Gone to Montreal and Toronto

Lachine Canal

Tomorrow, I depart for Montreal and Toronto for a one-week visit. While in Montreal, I plan to cycle the Lachine Canal Bike Path. I’m taking Ian Frazier’s Hogs Wild with me. I’ll post my review when I return, June 20^th. Salut!

Credit: The above photo of the Lachine Canal, by tango7174, is from Wikimedia Commons.

Ian Frazier's "Hogs Wild"

This is just a quick note to say that my copy of Ian Frazier’s new collection, Hogs Wild, arrived yesterday from Indigo. I’d pre-ordered it several months ago. Perusing the Table of Contents, I see many old friends  (e.g., “Hungry Minds,” “Back to the Harbor,” “Form and Fungus,” “Hogs Wild,” “On Impact,” “The March of the Strandbeests,” “The Toll,” “Hidden City,” and “Blue Bloods”). These wonderful pieces afforded me immense pleasure when they originally appeared in The New Yorker. It’s great to see them preserved between hard covers. I look forward to revisiting them. Hogs Wild also contains some writings that are new to me (e.g., “The One That Got Away,” “Desert Hideaway,” “The Unsettling Legacy of General Shrapnel”). The book is a rich feast. It’s tempting to devour it in a day. But I’m going to try to pace myself, savoring each piece, posting my responses here. Hogs Wild's publication is, for me, a major literary event. I hope I can do it justice.