Falling into that irresistible category of things we probably don't want to know, here is an up-close, personal look at insects as you've never seen them before. Striking a balance between the bizarre and the beautiful, Buzz features eye-popping and considerably larger-than-life electron microscope photographs that take us deep into the world of the buzzing, hopping, and crawling critters who live among us -- from the ants and wasps we thought we knew to dozens of other teeny-tiny creatures that teem beneath our notice. A lively and accessible text by Discover editor Josie Glausiusz explores the fascinating interactions of insects in a man-made world, and profiles of each insect introduce the workaday bugs that pollinate our crops, dispose of our trash, help solve crimes, and get stuck to the windshield. Readers be warned: You'll never look at your food, or your pillow, quite the same way again.

In this coffeetable-sized volume, Glausiusz, a senior editor at Discover magazine, explores the ways in which humans come into everyday contact with insects. The striking colorized photographs, taken by German photographer Steger using a SEM (scanning electron microscope), make one simultaneously wince and gaze in awe as each image displays insects much larger than life. As Glausiusz writes in her introduction, "Without insects and mites to recycle it, all the waste the we and other animals produce... would pile up to colossal heights." In prose almost as graphic as the photos themselves, she then describes the common bedbug, which procreates by "traumatic insemination," during which the "lusty" male stabs the female in the abdomen with his copulatory organ, the paramere. There are many photos not taken with the SEM, such as a close-up of a woman drawing blood with a syringe from a thumb-size castniid moth larva. But Glausiuz and Steger takes readers to the next intriguing level of the human-insect relationship as they explore such delicacies as a chocolate-covered Locusta migratoria (shown in a photo worthy of most high-end cookbooks), prepared by a Berlin chef.
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Volker Steger lives in Munich. His innovative and award-winning photography has been published in popular science and general interest magazines around the world.

Josie Glausiusz is a senior editor at Discover and has written on a wide range of scientific subjects. She lives in New York.