How to Get the Crabs

by Snowden Wright

“You come for the sand, and you leave with the crabs.” That warning would have been helpful if it had been given to Snowden Wright before he decided to spend a few months living at the beach. Written in discrete vignettes that coalesce into a single narrative arc, "How to Get the Crabs" explores the virtue of narrative itself, how sometimes recounting events can be more edifying than living them. Wright undergoes travails that include a weekend getaway at an expensive hotel, the loss of his virginity, and a torturous but redemptive encounter with pubic lice. Those stories and others combine to provide a unique answer to the question, "Is something bugging you?"

25 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 14, 2012

About the author

Snowden Wright is the author of the novel American Pop, a Wall Street Journal WSJ+ Book of the Month, selection for Barnes & Noble’s “Discover Great New Writers” program, Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Okra Pick, and NPR Favorite Book of the Year. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia University, he has written for The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, The Millions, and the New York Daily News, among other publications, and previously worked as a fiction reader at The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review.

Wright was the Visiting Writer and Prose Faculty at the 2021 Longleaf Writers Conference, and his debut novel, Play Pretty Blues, won the 2012 Summer Literary Seminars’ Graywolf Prize. Recipient of the Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship from the Carson McCullers Center, he has attended writing residencies at Yaddo, Escape to Create, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Tusen Takk, Monson Arts, and the Hambidge Center. Wright lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi. His third novel, The Queen City Detective Agency, is forthcoming from HarperCollins on August 13, 2024.