Subtitled “How nature’s most foul-smelling mushroom can change the way we listen,” this seriously strange book by my friend Siôn Parkinson (also the force behind Song Work) is a timely philosophical inquiry into at least three of our five senses. At its heart is a quasi-facsimile translation of a sixteenth-century pamphlet, “The Description of the Phallus,” an ode to the mushroom that influenced and eventually titled Siôn’s investigation.

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