Why a history of the novel in ants? It makes perfect sense because ants live in an almost exclusively female society. And as Ian Watt noted in THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, the majority of eighteenth century novels were written by -- as well as read by – women. The prevalence of women as readers and authors of fiction has continued to the present day. Within their all-female society, ants have conflicts, ants have ambitions and disappointments, ants have victories and defeats. Inhabiting an underground fortress of winding, labyrinthine galleries, ants can be gothic or postmodernist as the plot requires. For them the above-ground world of predators and enemies has a painful realism when it is not violently picaresque. Imagine translating Jane Austen into ants: your six-legged heroine will have not one or two but hundreds of gossiping, posturing, romantically and socially ambitious sisters, all striving to get precedence of one another. Or don't bother imagining it for yourself -- just read A HISTORY OF THE NOVEL IN ANTS. Carol Hart is a freelance science writer with a rusty PhD in English Literature. She reads a great many novels and she never steps on ants. This is her first novel.

Richly illustrated and delightfully written, Journey to the Ants combines autobiography and scientific lore to convey the excitement and pleasure the study of ants can offer. Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson interweave their personal adventures with the social lives of ants, building, from the first minute observations of childhood, a remarkable account of these abundant insects’ evolutionary achievement.

One of the earliest New World naturalists, José Celestino Mutis began his professional life as a physician in Spain and ended it as a scientist and natural philosopher in modern-day Colombia. Drawing on new translations of Mutis's nearly forgotten writings, this fascinating story of scientific adventure in eighteenth-century South America retrieves Mutis's contributions from obscurity. In 1760, the 28-year-old Mutis—newly appointed as the personal physician of the Viceroy of the New Kingdom of Granada—embarked on a 48-year exploration of the natural world of northern South America. His thirst for knowledge led Mutis to study the region's flora, become a professor of mathematics, construct the first astronomical observatory in the Western Hemisphere, and amass one of the largest scientific libraries in the world. He translated Newton's writings and penned essays about Copernicus; lectured extensively on astronomy, geography, and meteorology; and eventually became a priest. But, as two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Edward O. Wilson and Spanish natural history scholar José M. Gómez Durán reveal in this enjoyable and illustrative account, one of Mutis's most magnificent accomplishments involved ants. Acting at the urging of Carl Linnaeus—the father of taxonomy—shortly after he arrived in the New Kingdom of Granada, Mutis began studying the ants that swarmed everywhere. Though he lacked any entomological training, Mutis built his own classification for the species he found and named at a time when New World entomology was largely nonexistent. His unorthodox catalog of army ants, leafcutters, and other six-legged creatures found along the banks of the Magdalena provided a starting point for future study. Wilson and Durán weave a compelling, fast-paced story of ants on the march and the eighteenth-century scientist who followed them. A unique glance into the early world of science exploration, Kingdom of Ants is a delight to read and filled with intriguing information.

A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) From the “author to watch” (Kirkus Reviews) of The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley comes an “equal parts sarcastic and profound” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) novel about a teenage boy who must decide whether or not the world is worth saving. Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button. Only he isn’t sure he wants to. After all, life hasn’t been great for Henry. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend’s suicide last year. Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him. But Henry is a scientist first, and facing the question thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and cons: in the bully who is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. Weighing the pain and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate choice: push the button and save the planet and everyone on it…or let the world—and his pain—be destroyed forever.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist delivers "an astonishing literary achievement" (Anthony Gottlieb, The Economist). Winner of the 2010 Heartland Prize, Anthill follows the thrilling adventures of a modern-day Huck Finn, enthralled with the "strange, beautiful, and elegant" world of his native Nokobee County. But as developers begin to threaten the endangered marshlands around which he lives, the book’s hero decides to take decisive action. Edward O. Wilson—the world’s greatest living biologist—elegantly balances glimpses of science with the gripping saga of a boy determined to save the world from its most savage ecological predator: man himself.

Ants came to this planet long before man. Since then they have developed one of the most intricate civilizations imaginable – a civilization of great richness and technological brilliance. During the few seconds it takes you to read this sentence, some 700 milli0on ants will be born on earth... Edmond Wells had studied ants for years: he knew of the power which existed in their hidden world. On his death, he leaves his apartment to his nephew Jonathan with one proviso: that he must not descend beyond the cellar door. But when the family’s dog escapes down the cellar steps, Jonathan has little alternative but to follow. Innocently he enters the world of the ant, whose struggle for existence forces him to reassess man’s place in the cycle of nature. It is an experience that will alter his life for ever... Empire of the Ants is an extraordinary achievement. It takes you inside the ants’ universe and reveals it to be a highly organised world, as complex and relentless as human society and even more brutal.

“In Mr. Wilson ants have found not only their Darwin but also their Homer.” —Economist In Tales from the Ant World, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward O. Wilson takes us on a thrilling myrmecological tour across continents and through time, inviting us into his decades-long scientific obsession with ants. Animating his observations with personal stories, Wilson hones in on twenty-five ant species to explain how these creatures talk, smell, taste, and crucially, how they fight to determine dominance. Richly illustrated throughout with depictions of ant species and photos from Wilson’s own expeditions, Tales from the Ant World is a fascinating personal account from one of our greatest scientists—and a necessary volume for any lover of the natural world.