ABOUT THIS EPISODE
A new collection of evocative personal essays from one of America’s most beloved nonfiction writers, Anne Fadiman.
In Frog, Anne Fadiman returns to her favorite genre, the essay, of which she is one of our most celebrated practitioners. Ranging in subject matter from her deceased frog, to archaic printer technology, to the fraught relationship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his son Hartley, these essays unlock a whole world—one overflowing with mundanity and oddity—through sly observation and brilliant wit.
The diverse subjects of Frog are bound together by the quality of Fadiman’s attention, and subtly, they come to form a slantwise portrait of the artist, a writer dedicated to chronicling the world as it changes around her, in ways small and large, as time passes.
Anne Fadiman is the author, most recently, of the essay collection Frog (2026). Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Salon Book Award. In 2017, she published The Wine Lover’s Daughter, a memoir about her father. Fadiman has also written two essay collections, Ex Libris and At Large and At Small, and edited Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love. She is Professor in the Practice of English and Francis Writer in Residence at Yale.
Fadiman is in conversation with Isaac Arnsdorf, who covers the White House for The Washington Post. His work has received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting, the 2024 Ben Bradlee Award for Courage in Journalism, the 2019 Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism, and honorable mentions for the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting in 2019 and 2022. He is the author of Finish What We Started, about the MAGA movement since January 6, and coauthor of 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his family.
PURCHASE:
https://politics-prose.com/book/9780374608743?ic_referral=4liJASul5ddn9BK1jdeUYyqiGk_ALtH8miGuAgruiTowM21K9vj5GEXEchAGDZzE1GpjTAOMywHAO3JPTy0lgkz-8m54wLvxGKBcy8q9A8rr--2nYqw4-IaUQER53Cy5PxeyeBg
