{"product_id":"the-red-hourglass-the-red-hourglass-lives-of-the-predators-9780385318907","title":"The Red Hourglass: The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators","description":"Snake venom that digests human flesh. A building cleared of every living thing by a band of tiny spiders. An infant insect eating its living prey from within, saving the vital organs for last. These are among the deadly feats of natural engineering you'll witness in \u003ci\u003eThe Red Hourglass, \u003c\/i\u003e prize-winning author Gordon Grice's masterful, poetic, often dryly funny exploration of predators he has encountered around his rural Oklahoma home. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eGrice is a witty and intrepid guide through a world where mating ends in cannibalism, where killers possess toxins so lethal as to defy our ideas of a benevolent God, where spider remains, scattered like \"the cast-off coats of untidy children,\" tell a quiet story of violent self-extermination. It's a world you'll recognize despite its exotic strangeness--the world in which we live. Unabashedly stepping into the mix, Grice abandons his role as objective observer with beguiling dark humor--collecting spiders and other vermin, decorating a tarantula's terrarium with dollhouse furniture, or forcing a battle between captive insects because he deems one \"too stupid to live.\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eKill. Eat. Mate. Die. Charting the simple brutality of the lives of these predators, Grice's starkly graceful essays guide us toward startling truths about our own predatory nature. \u003ci\u003eThe Red Hourglass\u003c\/i\u003e brings us face to fanged face with the inadequacy of our distinctions between normal and abnormal, dead and alive, innocent and evil.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGordon Grice's writing about the black widow spider has appeared in \u003ci\u003eHigh Plains Literary Review\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eHarper's.\u003c\/i\u003e It has been anthologized in \u003ci\u003eHoughton Mifflin's Best American Essays 1996\u003c\/i\u003e and in college readers. Grice teaches humanities and English at Seward County Community College in Liberal, Kansas. He lives in rural Oklahoma with his wife and their three-year-old son.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Bantam Dell","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50844410609938,"sku":"9780385318907","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_ad848722-d3ce-4412-841a-637cc4ccc084.jpg?v=1737319361","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-red-hourglass-the-red-hourglass-lives-of-the-predators-9780385318907","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}