In At Large and At Small , Anne Fadiman returns to one of her favorite genres, the familiar essay―a beloved and hallowed literary tradition recognized for both its intellectual breadth and its miniaturist focus on everyday experiences. With the combination of humor and erudition that has distinguished her as one of our finest essayists, Fadiman draws us into twelve of her personal obsessions: from her slightly sinister childhood enthusiasm for catching butterflies to her monumental crush on Charles Lamb, from her wistfulness for the days of letter-writing to the challenges and rewards of moving from the city to the country. Many of these essays were composed "under the influence" of the subject at hand. Fadiman ingests a shocking amount of ice cream and divulges her passion for Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Chocolate Chip and her brother's homemade Liquid Nitrogen Kahlúa Coffee (recipe included); she sustains a terrific caffeine buzz while recounting Balzac's coffee addiction; and she stays up till dawn to write about being a night owl, examining the rhythms of our circadian clocks and sharing such insomnia cures as her father's nocturnal word games and Lewis Carroll's mathematical puzzles. At Large and At Small is a brilliant and delightful collection of essays that harkens a revival of a long-cherished genre. “Anne Fadiman wins our attention by directing hers with unwavering focus at the world around her. Her perceptions are astute and her sensibility is so rich and sane no calculation could violate it. The personal essay was invented so that writers like Fadiman could practice it.” ― Sven Birkerts “Limpid, learned, perspicacious--and relentless. Whatever the subject, Anne Fadiman overlooks nothing, imparts everything, and leaves you wanting more.” ― Thomas Mallon “These are wonderful essays. The writing is effortless, elegant, and clear, the subjects delightful or weighty or both. Anne Fadiman had me completely charmed by page four.” ― Ian Frazier 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. At Large and At Small Familiar Essays By Anne Fadiman Farrar, Straus and Giroux Copyright © 2007 Anne Fadiman All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-374-53131-7 Contents Title Page, PREFACE, COLLECTING NATURE, THE UNFUZZY LAMB, ICE CREAM, NIGHT OWL, PROCRUSTES AND THE CULTURE WARS, COLERIDGE THE RUNAWAY, MAIL, MOVING, A PIECE OF COTTON, THE ARCTIC HEDONIST, COFFEE, UNDER WATER, ALSO BY ANNE FADIMAN, About the Author, Praise for At Large and At Small, SOURCES, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, Copyright Page, CHAPTER 1 COLLECTING NATURE The net was green. The handle was wood, and the grip was uncomfortably thick, like that of a tennis racket borrowed from an older player. The mesh bag was long enough that if we caught a tiger swallowtail — or a spicebush swallowtail, or a mourning cloak, or a European cabbage, or a common sulphur, or a red admiral, or a painted lady, or a monarch, or a viceroy — we could, with a twist of the wrist, flip its tapered tip over the wire rim and trap the butterfly inside. Then, being careful not to scrape off the colored scales, we pinched the wings shut and transferred the butterfly to the killing jar. (Our bible, A Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America, East of the Great Plains, by Alexander B. Klots, recommended a more complicated method of transfer that involved holding the handle between one's thighs, grasping the bag just below the butterfly, slipping the jar into the net, and coaxing the butterfly into the jar. But this technique demanded a prodigious level of coordination — on the order, say, of that displayed by the Cat in the Hat when he balanced a goldfish bowl on an umbrella while standing on a rubber ball — and we were never able to master it.) My brother and I had started with a shallow plastic container, like a petri dish, which came in the children's butterfly kit that we had rapidly outgrown, but because the hindwing projections of the swallowtails tended to get crushed against the perimeter, we graduated to a large glass jar from which our mother had scrubbed the last traces of strawberry jam. At the bottom of the killing jar was a piece of cotton saturated with carbon tetrachloride. "Carbon tet," we called it, not because it was easier to pronounce — we shared a weakness for long words — but because the nickname suggested that we and it were on familiar terms, as was indeed the case. Thirty years later, a frien