Frog and Other Essays by Anne Fadiman

Frog and Other Essays

By Anne Fadiman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2026

There will be no midnight release party for Frog, no block-long queues of costumed fans. Yet, to readers who know, the appearance of a new Anne Fadiman work is cause for just such joyous celebration. Her 1997 debut, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, traced the conflict between Western medicine and traditional culture. It won award after award. The Wine Lover’s Daughter (2017) divulged the author’s family secrets with humor and the insight that can come only with decades of reflection. But Fadiman’s best-loved works are her two essay collections, Ex Libris (1998) and At Large and at Small (2007). In this format she can flit between topics within the space of pages, unleashing the alternating wit and emotional impact that has become her hallmark.

Frog compiles six essays first published in slightly different form in periodicals, plus a seventh that appeared as the introduction to a collection of another author’s works. New York Times Magazine columnist and podcaster Sam Anderson provides a foreword written in a breezy style reminiscent of Fadiman’s own. Some of the book’s contents are charming. Some are humorous bordering on silly. Two others—including “South Polar Times,” the profile of a magazine written by Antarctic exploration crews—warn that unpleasantness is to come. Then the Fadiman descriptive turn makes the pages that follow so upbeat and entertaining that the reader forgets the promised tragedy. In each case the reminder, when it comes, is a gut punch.

The title work describes the long, dull life of the author’s children’s first pet, a mail-order tadpole that grew into an African clawed frog. This purely aquatic creature—no leaps, no rock sunbaths—resembled less a living, breathing animal than a motionless lump of putty. Yet he lived for at least sixteen years and until his death “Bunky appeared to be in the pink, or rather the pale greige, of health.” Over time, the children’s attention was absorbed by more complex, more loving pets. Despite this essay’s light tone, Fadiman reports feeling guilt in Bunky’s later years that the family had not done enough to make his life worthwhile:

I always felt he knew his aquarium was too small without ever having lived in a larger one, the way he knew his Stage Two Nuggets were meh even though he’d never eaten a wood louse, the way he knew he was lonely without ever having seen a female frog. He knew.

Two of the remaining essays derive from Fadiman’s teaching career at Yale University. “Screen Share” reveals how a carefully planned writing class was upended overnight by the COVID-19 shutdown. Bright Ivy Leaguers who would have been on nearly an equal footing in a classroom were now confined to their homes and forced to communicate solely through streaming software. Suddenly their situations seemed less fair:

Some Yale students are completing their classes from private bedrooms in comfortable houses while their parents work from dedicated home offices and have groceries delivered by Instacart. Others are homeschooling their siblings in cramped apartments with sick relatives while their parents work in essential jobs, and are attending Zoom classes from the bathroom or with the TV blaring. All these students will be competing for the same positions once they graduate.

It is a joy to read Fadiman’s account of how her students made the best of their isolation and grew as writers and as human beings. The second Yale essay, “Yes to Everything,” pays tribute to a life cut short: a student whose considerable literary talents Fadiman watched blossom but who died in a car crash just days after her graduation.

The amusing “My First Printer” and “All My Pronouns” explore twenty-first-century themes from a distinctly Baby Boom viewpoint. In the first of these, Fadiman outlines how for three decades she cannibalized a series of 1980s computer printers to preserve one working model with the features she liked. When this finally expired, a rival company wooed her with a free machine “like a heroin dealer handing out samples in the expectation that a lucrative addition—in this case, to those effing little colored ink cartridges—would soon repay his generosity.” The second, largely a history of the shifting sands of pronoun use, is most delightful when the author delves into the difference between “splitters” and “lumpers” and admits that, as a born “grammar Tory,” her desire to respect other peoples’ identities is balanced by the almost physical pain she suffers in using the singular they.

Perhaps Frog’s strongest essay is the second, “The Oakling and the Oak,” about the ill-fated elder son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, known to many of his father’s friends as “Poor Hartley.” In childhood and as a young scholar, Hartley Coleridge showed real promise. But, just as S.T.C. towered over him by a full ten inches, there was an equivalent difference in their respective talents. What the young man did inherit was the family instability and tendency to self-medicate. And whenever Hartley made a slip as he groped his way toward success, he could count on his famous father to react publicly with an excess of drama.

Fadiman revels in the chance to profile a child of literary celebrities, and for good reason. Her own mother was Annalee Whitmore, war correspondent and coauthor (as Annalee Jacoby) of the seminal Second World War study Thunder Out of China. Her father was the distinguished critic and literary scholar Clifton Fadiman. “The upside of this print-smudged parentage,” she observes, “was that I was raised in a home with six thousand books, plenty of literary conversation, and empirical evidence that writing was something you could actually do for a living. The downside was that I knew that no matter what I did, my parents would already have done it better.” Such was also the case for “Poor Hartley,” though Fadiman makes a good case for considering his literary output on its own merits.

The parts that make up the whole of Frog are above reproach. In fact, they are all so good that it is difficult for an admiring reader not to devour them one after the other. But it might have been wiser not to place the two gut-punch essays together at the end of the collection. To put “My First Printer” or even “Frog” in the penultimate spot would have let readers close the volume still remembering the sunnier side of Anne Fadiman. The edition read for this review was a pre-edit proof, so it is possible that a change has already been made.

Katherine Harper is an independent editor, mainly of nonfiction works for university and academic presses. Learn more at http://www.kharpereditor.com.