Review: Siôn Parkinson, Stinkhorn: How Nature’s Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen (Sternberg Press, 2024)

Abstract

Fascination with mushrooms has experienced a curious renaissance in the humanities within recent decades, as indicated by the scholarly interventions of Anna Tsing (The Mushroom at the End of the World, 2015), John Cage (A Mycological Foray, 2020), and Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life, 2020); to name but a few. To this ever-growing field of research, a new and highly evocative title is added. Siôn Parkinson’s Stinkhorn: How Nature’s Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen is a volume perfumed with thought-provoking entries on the shared resonances between putrid smells, aural landscapes, and phallic fungi. Beyond the arresting image of a ripe dune stinkhorn proudly adorning the front cover, the reader encounters a heady concoction of etymological musings, philosophical provocations and punny wordplays, all of which waft together with each turn of a page. In stylish Plantin typeface, Parkinson crafts an elegant reflection on what is largely considered to be one of the strangest – if not the smelliest – mushrooms to have protruded from the ground below: Phallus impudicus, also known as the ‘common stinkhorn’. While the book reflects a thorough engagement with natural history and mycology, it is wonderfully generous in how it conveys the story of this shameless, earthy growth, and its power to captivate the minds (or indeed noses) of thinkers such as Pliny the Elder, Hadrianus Junius, and John Gerard.