shell game

The Shell Game

University of Nebraska, 2018

The Shell Game is a collection of "hermit crab essays," or essays that borrow their forms from ordinary sources. The anthology includes, for instance, an essay written as a recipe, another as a crossword puzzle, and another as a Craigslist ad. Edited and with an introduction by Kim Adrian, the collection explores a broad range of subjects, from the secrets of the human genome to the intractable pain of growing up Black in America. Surprising, delightful, and lyric, The Shell Game offers a vivid introduction to this increasingly popular hybrid genre.

- PRAISE -

“The Shell Game pushes the boundaries of prose and opens up a whole new world. . . . It makes readers feel as if they are learning what an essay is (or could be) all over again.”
—New Pages

“The essays in this collection bring with them a sense of hope about literature and its capacity for evolution and change.”
—The Millions

“Kim Adrian’s introduction demonstrates the potential and beauty of the hermit crab approach as she lays out the history of the metaphor using kingdom, phyla, species, etc., to identify the literary heritage and taxonomy of the hermit crab essay itself. . . . Her introduction, as lyrical as it is, is often laugh-out-loud funny.”
—Literary Journalism Studies

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