What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make

"Move over, Paul Stamets and Michael Pollan! Reading What a Mushroom Lives For is like having someone gently turn the living world inside out and upside down for you. In stunning prose, Michael Hathaway celebrates the liveliness and dynamic intelligence of those essential workers who dwell in a hidden biocultural landscape at our feet. Eloquent, erudite, and at times darkly funny, Hathaway's narrative sheds fresh light on the meaning of that hackneyed rhyme, ‘there is a fungus among us.’ ”—Gary Paul Nabhan, author of Food from the Radical Center

“A truly delightful and much-needed journey into ‘myco-centrism’! This book is an important invitation to think about interspecies organization from a collaborative point of view, with all its complexities and implications. Not only does it invite us to understand how some fungi live, but also how through their existence they can craft cultures and societies. It is much repeated that fungi are the interconnectors of nature, and this book takes that concept to another sociological and philosophical level.”—Giuliana Furci, founder and CEO of the Fungi Foundation

“I found this book delightful. It is a poetic story of fungi and some of the ways in which they are beautiful, fascinating, and endowed with stories that entangle humans yet remain all their own.”—Rob Dunn, author of A Natural History of the Future

“What a Mushroom Lives For is a captivating journey into a manifold of lives—arboreal, human, and otherwise—that make and are made by the distinctive matsutake mushroom. Michael Hathaway carefully weaves together stories, theories, field notes, drawings, and diagrams gathered over a decade to model ways in which readers might begin to inhabit mushroom worlds.”—Elaine Gan, coeditor of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet