Henri Vaillancourt was in his twenties in Greenville, New Hampshire, building birchbark canoes by hand — no plans, no power tools, bark peeled off standing trees, split spruce root for lashing, pitch for the seams — because almost nobody was…
Robert Moor
The author of On Trails turns to biology, taking the tree as a lens and “treethinking” as a path to wisdom. The metaphor strains by the fourth or fifth application, but the range is his point and the reporting earns the reach.
Allegra Goodman
There’s little in the opening pages to suggest this 2025 novel will turn into a great adventure yarn replete with the hand-knife beheading of an attacking polar bear. It’s the early 1500s and orphaned French noblewoman Marguerite de la Rocque…
Chi Zijian
A ninety-year-old Evenki woman, wife of this northern China clan’s last chieftain, tells the story of a century of her reindeer-herding people’s life to “the rain and the fire” over the course of a single day, as the last of…
Daniel Duane
My favorite Daniel Duane book, and that’s saying something from the man who wrote Caught Inside. A Sierra boyhood braided with the harder history behind the postcard, and he never stops loving the place even as he reckons with it.
Merritt R. Turetsky
Takes the most sneered-at ground on earth and contends it’s one of the planet’s great underrated systems. It leans hard on “liminal” and the closing pep talk is earnest to a fault, but it’s a great read anyway.
Kiliii Yüyan
A book-length argument for entrusting Indigenous peoples with the land they have stewarded for millennia, and I’m convinced. The statistics do real work here, but it’s Yüyan’s photographs from nine Native communities that actually land the case.
Kory Stamper
Kory Stamper spent decades writing dictionaries at Merriam-Webster, and she kept getting stuck on the color entries in Webster’s Third, which are gloriously nuts. Begonia is defined as a deep pink that’s bluer than fiesta and stronger than sweet william.…
Colson Whitehead
Cora is a teenager on a Georgia cotton plantation, working a patch of dirt her grandmother claimed, abandoned by a mother who ran and never sent word. When Caesar asks her to go with him, she says no, then says…
Claire Vaye Watkins
This is Watkins’s fourth book. Rose of Sharon — named for the Grapes of Wrath character — is a Sierra Club fundraiser living in a cinder block cabin in the Mojave, her daughter living with an ex on the East…
Raphael Montes
Brazilian thriller from 2016, first published in English by Celadon in August 2026. Four childhood friends leave rural Brazil for a shared apartment in Copacabana — students working part-time jobs, chasing the city and a future. When the rent jumps…
Andrew Sean Greer
The writing in this book is anguished from the first page: It’s precious, far too self-aware, awkward, and twee. It set me on edge. I pushed through another or ten or so pages and gave up. I might return for…
Tiffany Crum
A debut mystery about Benny Abbott and Joy Moore, best friends who host a hit podcast built on “against all odds” survival stories — near-death experiences told with a lot of gallows humor. Their show is on the verge of…
Caro Claire Burke
This might have been the most talked-about book of 2026, and it brought the term tradwife to the consciousness of the many thousands of people who had no idea. Natalie Heller Mills is an influencer who sells the pioneer life…
Taylor Brown
Trace Temple’s family lost their New Mexico ranch after somebody shot an endangered wolf, and now he’s living out of his truck, broke and pissed at the government. A secretive militia offers him money to kill One-Eleven, the she-wolf leading…
David Yetman
Yetman and his coauthors cover the saguaro’s biology and its absurd arithmetic — it takes decades to reach a few inches, a hundred and fifty years to full height, thousands of seeds a year of which almost none survive —…
Peter Wohlleben
Wohlleben’s argument is that forests are better at adapting than we credit and that most of what we call forest management gets in the way. Trees pass on learned drought responses to their offspring, which is inheritance without genetics. Old…
Gary Snyder
Nine essays, and the central move is to separate wilderness from wildness. Wilderness is a legal designation; wildness is a quality of self-organizing process, present in an old-growth forest and equally in your own body and in language. Snyder writes…
Patti Smith
Patti Smith wrote this in her forties, a short book about being a child in southern New Jersey — the fields behind the house, the woolgatherers she imagined moving through them at dusk, a slaughterhouse, a cloud museum, her brother…
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Simpson is Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, a writer and musician, and this book thinks with water rather than about it. She starts from a Nishnaabeg story about a woman and a flood and works outward through ice, rain, tributaries, and the…
John Jeremiah Sullivan
Fourteen pieces and hardly a dud. Sullivan at a Christian rock festival in an RV with a group of West Virginia teenagers, at Disney World with the Real World cast, in the Ozarks with Axl Rose’s hometown. Also: The cave…
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
Forty-nine British birds, every one of them in decline, from avocet to yellowhammer. Macfarlane writes each as a short essay rather than an identification entry — habits, flight, song, myth, and threat — and he varies the form wildly, including…
Tony Judt
Europe from the rubble of 1945 to 2005, east and west given equal weight, in one nine-hundred-page volume by a historian who could actually write. The material everybody knows — Marshall Plan, Wall, 1968, 1989 — is here, but the…
George Saunders
This the story collection that put Saunders on a lot radars. A boy imagining himself heroic in the woods and a dying man walking out onto a frozen pond to spare his family. Prisoners in a facility being dosed with…
George Saunders
Six stories, and the title one has a man and a woman playing cave people in a theme park exhibit, required to grunt at visitors, receiving a daily goat, and filing performance reports on each other. That’s the register throughout:…
