FEARLESS, SLEEPLESS, DEATHLESS

Common mushrooms provide a springboard for wide-ranging essays.

In her first book, avid amateur mycologist Pinto, a “neurodivergent, naturalized US citizen from the Caribbean, and a descendent of enslaved people,” weaves her personal history and infectious affection for the “understudied kingdom” of fungi into nine essays that anchor themselves in the specifics of a particular type of mushroom before bouncing off to consider topics such as the aftermath of forest fires, psychedelic experiences, Haitian zombies, the impulse toward suicide, and the complicated ethics of foraging. Based in Boston, Pinto does much of her mushroom hunting in the Northeast, as when she heads with a friend to New Hampshire to seek out “sharp and spicy” matsutake mushrooms, with their “wonderful wee domes, like someone has just poured au jus over a perfectly poached goose egg.” But she also ventures further afield, as when she investigates the farming of black winter truffles, with their odors of “garlic, motor oil, soy sauce, wine, and acetone” in the Virginia Piedmont. Pinto isn’t afraid to let a dark, and darkly humorous, side show, as when she recounts with relish the horrifying speech about the effects of deadly mushrooms that she gives to her mushroom tour groups, or when she describes a zombie ant, possessed by a fungus, “mycelium made ambulatory,” in the process of becoming “a fungal sculpture, bursting cottony at the seams.” But her essays also fizz with gratitude and sensual pleasure: “The study of mushrooms taught me to see plenty, abundance, and potential where I’d been taught there was none.” Even the most mycophobic would have a hard time reading her essays without falling a little in love with her alternately forbidding and thrilling subjects.

This delectably provocative fungal sampling gives the reader much to savor.