"Maria Tatar concludes her spider book with the wish, echoing George Eliot's Middlemarch , that we see our world, with all of its conflicts and contradictions, as 'agreeable.' Her rumination on spiders, their reality and our fear or fascination, is a joyful book: demanding only that we spend a few hours living with the writers and artists and storytellers who too find our arachnid companions helpful in making their complex worlds agreeable. The best book on animals, nature, and art written this decade."-- Sander L. Gilman, author of Doc or Quack: Science and Anti-Science in Modern Medicine "I have loved writing and reading about spiders my entire career and was totally captivated by Maria's Tatar's book. Her knowledge and perspective on how spiders have influenced folklore, myths, children's literature, and popular culture makes for fascinating reading. While we embrace spiders like the spider hero of Charlotte's Web , they are also one of our most feared animals. I hope Tatar's book helps readers appreciate spiders, who live among us and mean us no harm.

Her wonderful book means I will never again see the word 'spinster' without thinking of spiders and their masterful weaving!"-- Simon D. Pollard, author of The Little Book of Spiders "Maria Tatar's Arachnomania is an engrossing new study of the symbolic cultural weight of spiders. Drawing on myth, literature, and the visual arts, Tatar disentangles complex plots and traces characters spinning tales or weaving spells and webs, revealing in so doing the animal's creative potential. Her well-documented and comprehensive overview shows how much spiders reflect our own social world, and will be of value to a wide range of friends and foes of the eight-legged creatures."-- Laurence Talairach, author of Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture.