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…
Emily St. John Mandel
An actor dies onstage during King Lear in Toronto on the night a flu arrives that will kill almost everybody. Twenty years later, the Traveling Symphony walks a circuit around the Great Lakes performing Shakespeare for the settlements that are…
Mur Lafferty
Mallory Viridian has a problem: People keep getting murdered around her, and she keeps solving the cases, and after enough bodies nobody wants her near them. So she moves to a sentient space station called Eternity, which is largely populated…
Janet Malcolm
Malcolm spent a career taking other people apart in print and refused to write about herself, then in her eighties wrote this — twenty-odd short pieces, each triggered by a photograph from her own boxes. A Czech Jewish family that…
Sanmao
Sanmao was a Taiwanese writer who read one article about the Sahara and moved there, marrying a Spanish diver named José and settling in El Aaiún in the Spanish Sahara in the 1970s. These are her dispatches: Building furniture out…
A.E. Gauntlett
Annie is a university professor who never much believed in love until Mark, a surgeon she kept passing on the morning commute and then met properly at a support group for trauma survivors. Both of them are carrying something they…
Laura Poppick
Deep time told through the layers themselves. Poppick is a science journalist and she goes to the outcrops with the geologists reading them — banded iron formations recording the moment oxygen first flooded the ocean, the black shales of a…
Robert Finch
Finch wrote Cape Cod for forty years, then started spending summers in a Newfoundland outport called Burnside — known locally as Squid Tickle — population under two hundred, on Bonavista Bay. The book is the accumulation of those seasons: Icebergs,…
Carrot Quinn
This book stopped me in my, ahem, tracks, and I was obsessed with the idea of excerpting it in Adventure Journal (we did—thanks, Carrot!). Quinn grew up in Anchorage with a mother deep in untreated schizophrenia — no heat, no…
Alex Riley
Some critters will go a long way for a little privacy. Ten years after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, thirty-seven forms of fungi were found growing inside the abandoned reactor, some of them thriving; this led microbiologist Nelli Zhdanova and colleagues…
Gary Shteyngart
A near-future America where everyone wears an äppärät around their neck broadcasting their credit rating and screwability to everyone in the room, the dollar is pegged to the yuan, and the country is being run into default by a party…
Matt Titone
No matter how swanky the houses in the third iteration of Gestalten’s addictively voyeuristic Surf Shacks series, you know there’s sand on the floor—maybe not in the luscious pictures, but just before or after. What distinguishes these forty homes, from…
Indoek
Matt Titone is a SoCal graphic designer with a wide range of creative projects, including a Ventura, California gallery called Indoek. In this first of his three “surf shacks” books, he photographed surfers at their homes, not in the water,…
John McPhee
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…
Leslie Kean
Kean is a journalist who applied the same method here she used on UFOs: Go to the best-documented cases, interview the researchers, report what holds up. That means young children with detailed verifiable memories of previous lives, work from the…
Seth Kantner
Kantner’s collected dispatches — columns, essays, and reportage from northwest Alaska written over a couple of decades. Wolves and caribou and the biologists counting them, the economics of a village where a gallon of gas costs what it does, snow…
George Saunders
George Saunders taught a class on the nineteenth-century Russian short story at Syracuse for twenty years, and this book is that class on the page. Seven stories in translation, three by Chekhov and the rest by Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol,…
Ueda Akinari
First published in 1776, the nine gothic tales in this collection are Japan’s finest and most celebrated examples of the literature of the occult. They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the…
M. Kat Anderson
The California the Spanish and then the Americans walked into looked like untouched abundance, and Anderson’s book shows it was a garden. Indigenous Californians burned meadows on schedule, coppiced hazel and redbud so the shoots would come back straight enough…
Graham Greene
It’s set in a German prison in occupied France, with thirty hostages, three to be shot, lots drawn to see who goes. Chavel, a wealthy lawyer, draws one of the marked slips and offers everything he owns — house, money,…
George Saunders
This is the story collection that put Saunders on many people’s radars. There’s 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…
Margaret Atwood
It’s thirty-odd years after The Handmaid’s Tale, told by three women. Aunt Lydia, the most senior of the Aunts, who runs Ardua Hall and has spent years quietly compiling files on everybody who matters. Agnes, raised inside as a commander’s…
Christof Koch
Koch spent decades at Caltech hunting the neural correlates of consciousness with Francis Crick, and this is his case for integrated information theory — the idea that consciousness is a measure of how much a system’s parts inform each other…
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…
Graham Greene
Vienna after the war, the city carved into four occupation zones and half of it rubble. Rollo Martins, a broke writer of pulp westerns, arrives to take a job from his old friend Harry Lime and finds Lime’s funeral instead.…
