Faye Heron is a Hollywood screenwriter, married to her producing partner, and she owes her whole career to a film professor at the small upstate New York college she attended. He dies, she goes back for the funeral, and there’s…
Peter Heller
Jim Stegner is a painter with a real market, two dead marriages, a daughter who was murdered, and a prison term for shooting a man in a bar. He’s living in Colorado trying to fish and paint and stay level.…
Jason Matthews
Dominika is back in Moscow, promoted, and now spying for the Americans from inside the SVR while being personally noticed by Putin, who appears as himself throughout. The operational thread runs to Vienna and to an Iranian nuclear program, and…
Brian Kelley
Author and photographer Brian Kelley has a huge collection of U.S. national park maps and ephemera—at least twelve hundred items. He notes, “If you just have one map, it doesn’t feel as significant. But then when you start getting this…
Vijay Khurana
Two teenagers, Adam and Teddy, in a small town at the end of a summer. Adam is the one with the ideas, deep in video games and internet grievance; Teddy is the one who goes along to see what happens.…
George Saunders
It’s 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…
I.S. Berry
Shane Collins is fifty-two, divorced, twenty-five years in the CIA, and finishing his career in Bahrain during the Arab Spring, chasing evidence of Iranian support for the Shia uprising that his bosses in Washington badly want to exist. He’s tired,…
Richard A. Rogers
Rogers is a communication scholar, and his subject isn’t what rock art meant but what we keep doing with it. Visitor centers, guidebooks, New Age tours, corporate logos, and the shaman theory all get examined as acts of appropriation, each…
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard was in her twenties, living beside a creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge, when she spent a year writing what she saw there — muskrats, a mantis laying eggs, a frog that a giant water bug drains to a…
John McPhee
A million acres of sand and pitch pine in the middle of the most crowded state in the country, sitting on an aquifer holding trillions of gallons of clean water, with almost nobody living in it. McPhee spent months there…
James Rebanks
Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd who wrote The Shepherd’s Life, went to a bare island off the coast of northern Norway for a season to work with a woman named Anna in her seventies — one of the last of…
Richard Powers
Four lives converging on Makatea, a French Polynesian island strip-mined for phosphate decades ago and now down to eighty residents who are being asked to vote on whether a consortium can build the first floating city offshore. There’s a tech…
Perrin Roosevelt Ireland
Sex sells, even animal sex, and Perrin Roosevelt Ireland has made a career as a science educator by focusing on the squirts, wriggles, and wee thumps of the faunal world. Known on social media for her short dispatches on creature…
Grace D. Li
Will Chen is a Chinese American art history student at Harvard who witnesses a museum heist and shortly thereafter is approached by a Chinese corporation with an offer: Fifty million dollars to steal back five bronze zodiac heads looted from…
Tony Judt
What the title says: 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 —…
Naomi Alderman
Teenage girls start producing an electrical charge from a strand of muscle across the collarbone, enough to hurt, enough to kill. They can wake it in older women. Inside a decade, the whole arrangement of the world has flipped. Alderman…
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
Over nine essays, Snyder strives 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. He writes about walking,…
Helen Macdonald
Sunil Rao can tell whether any statement is true — no explanation, he just knows — and he’s been used for that by intelligence services until they got tired of his drug habit. Adam Rubenstein is the American colonel sent…
Max Barry
Humans hit something in deep space called the salamanders, which killed the crew that found them, and humanity built a war fleet in response. Providence Five carries four people and an AI that does all the fighting, plotting, and deciding…
Andy Kirkpatrick
Kirkpatrick spent twelve days alone on the Reticent Wall on El Capitan, one of the hardest aid routes in the world, hauling everything himself, sleeping in a portaledge, terrified most of the time. The climb runs through the book pitch…
John Jeremiah Sullivan
Here are fourteen pieces, almost all of them exemplary. 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.…
Graham Greene
It’s Saigon in the early fifties, the French war going badly. Fowler is a British reporter, middle-aged, opium in the afternoons, living with a young Vietnamese woman named Phuong and determined to have no opinions about anything. Pyle is a…
Chloe Dalton
Dalton was a foreign policy adviser in Westminster, stranded at a country house during lockdown, when she found a newborn leveret alone on a track. Hares aren’t domesticable — they’ve never been tamed, they die of stress in captivity, and…
Andrea Lankford
Twelve years as a National Park Service ranger — Yosemite, Zion, Grand Canyon, Denali — and this is the version they don’t print in the brochure. Body recoveries below the rim, drug busts, car wrecks, search and rescue for people…
