Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

This book is about a strange object—strange in part because it is something that we all have been, and that many of us eat. Nicole Walker‘s Egg relishes in sharp juxtapositions of seemingly fanciful or repellent topics, so that reproductive science and gustatory habits are considered alongside one another, and personal narrative and broad swaths of natural history jostle, like yolk and albumen. Mapping curious eggs across times, scales, and spaces, Egg draws together surprising perspectives on this common object—egg as food, as art object, as metaphor and feminist symbol, as cultural icon.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.