by Maria Pinto
University of North Carolina Press
10/28/2025, paperback
SKU: 9781469689791
Naturalist, forager, and educator Maria Pinto offers a stunning debut book that uncovers strange and beautiful fungal connections between the natural and human worlds. She mingles reportage, research, memoir, and nature writing, touching on topics that range from Black farmers' domestication of the unforgettable aroma of truffles to the possibility that enslaved people wielded mycological poisons against their enslavers.
Pinto brings a new perspective and a distinctive literary voice to this mix of environmental and lived history, and every page sings with her enthusiasm for the networks in which we are embedded: fungal, ecological, ancestral, and communal. Join her in pursuit of beautiful, perplexing, delicious, and deadly mushrooms as she explores this understudied kingdom's awe-inspiring diversity and discovers how fungi have been used by people, especially those on the margins, for survival, pleasure, revelation, and revolution.
Reviews:
"Zombies! Poison! Colonialism! Adventure! Mutual Aid! Pinto tells it all--and with great style. . . . [H]er energetic use of language, irony, and humor will leave you grinning. Personal, daring, and utterly delightful."--Orion Magazine
"Pinto has executed a singular work of Black naturalism. She's charting a different, and much-needed, path for nature writing where there is radicalism, self-love, lineage, and community in nature. The woods, she tells us, should belong to everybody. I wish I'd had this text when I was young, unmoved by other naturalists. I am glad to have it now."--Gabriel Bump, author of The New Naturals
"Reading Maria Pinto's Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless, I am stopped in my tracks again and again--admiring a string of lusciously juxtaposed words, laughing out loud at a slice of irony, thrilling at the syntax, the sentences--as her language carries, and often almost sings, the beauty and mystery and puzzlement and danger and invention and entanglement and fecundity and wonder of the mycological. And the mycophilic. I have rarely encountered such beautiful writing. I have rarely encountered such a beautiful book."--Ross Gay, author of The Book of (More) Delights
"Pinto celebrates the interconnectedness of the natural world in this joyful mix of memoir, science, history, and adventure . . . . She ends on a poignant, hopeful note, envisioning a future for humankind inspired by fungi, made up of communities that flourish through mutual aid. With echoes of Jamaica Kincaid and Annie Dillard, this is a treat for nature lovers and mushroom aficionados."--Publishers Weekly
About the Author:
Maria Pinto is a Boston-area writer, mycophile, and educator who was born in Jamaica and grew up in South Florida.