Barry Lopez spent five years going north — on the ice with Inuit and Iñupiat hunters, on ships, in camps with biologists — and came back with the book that made his name. It won the National Book Award in…
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
It’s near-future America, where the prison system got turned into a televised blood sport. Sign up for the program and you fight other prisoners to the death on live TV; if you survive three years, you walk free. Almost nobody…
Peter Swanson
A short one, told mostly as a diary, and it’s pulpy. Ashley, an American student in London in the nineties, is invited home to a friend’s family estate in the country for Christmas — an old house, a brother she’s…
David Rains Wallace
Here’s the riddle: Nobody can say how old the California desert actually is, or where its plants and animals came from. Creosote, ocotillo, cactus, the chuckwalla itself — did they evolve out there over tens of millions of years, or…
David Mitchell
Six stories nested inside each other like a set of dolls. A lawyer crossing the Pacific in 1850. A broke young composer in Belgium in 1931 conning his way into an old master’s house. A reporter in 1970s California chasing…
Nathaniel Rich
Forget banks. The real vault is a data center — endless rows of drives holding everybody’s private business, sitting in a windowless building nobody guards like a bank. Tim is a climate reporter worn out from writing the end of…
Mick Herron
Ninth in the Slough House run, where MI5 parks the agents it can’t fire — bad spies serving out their careers shuffling paper under Jackson Lamb, who is filthy, cruel, and smarter than everybody. (Praise baby Jesus for Gary Oldman’s…
Michael Easter
Easter went thirty-three days into the Arctic on a caribou hunt with no resupply, and he uses that trip as the backbone for the rest. His case? That we engineered away every discomfort humans evolved with — hunger, cold, heat,…
John McPhee
McPhee went north in the mid-seventies, right as the Land Claims Act carved the state up and everybody was fighting over what would be park, what would be Native, what would stay open. The book comes in three parts. First,…
Kenneth Arnold
On June 24, 1947, a private pilot flying near Mount Rainier saw nine objects moving in formation and later described their motion as like a saucer skipping across water. A reporter turned that into “flying saucer” and the phrase went…
John McPhee
I think this might have been my first McPhee book. It’s three long pieces about people trying to stop geology. The Army Corps of Engineers at the Old River Control Structure in Louisiana, holding the Mississippi in its channel against…
Daniel Mason
Miles Krzelewski is forty-five and fourteen years into a dissertation on Russian folktales that keeps changing topic every time it gets hard. His wife Kate lands a one-year visiting professorship at a college in Vermont, so the whole family —…
Dan Flores
Wolves got wiped out of the Lower 48. Coyotes got the same treatment — bounties, poison, a federal agency that killed millions of them for the better part of a century — and instead of dying off they spread into…
Jessica Easto
No espresso in it at all, which is the first thing worth knowing. Easto sticks to manual brewing and covers ten devices — French press, Chemex, V60, AeroPress, siphon, cold brew, the lot — and treats them as variations on…
Rachel Kushner
Sadie Smith is a hired spy — ex-federal, now freelance, working for clients she never meets. Her job is to get inside a commune of radical farmers in southwest France and push them into doing something illegal enough to jail…
Rick Rubin
People went bananas over this book, but I’m not one of them. Rubin has produced records for Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, Slayer, and Adele, and he does not play an instrument or work a board. What he does is…
Huw Lewis-Jones
In 1957 and 1958, the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition drove tractors two thousand miles across the continent through the pole, the first surface crossing ever made, with Hillary’s team laying depots from the far side. George Lowe was the expedition photographer…
Cormac McCarthy
The second McCarthy border novel — a young man crosses into Mexico to return a wolf to the wild. The wolf doesn’t survive. Neither does the old world McCarthy is eulogizing. If McCarthy’s your jam, the prose is as good…
Gabriel Tallent
Gabriel Tallent’s second novel, Crux, feels as if it’s trying to squeeze every possible metaphor out of every possible climbing term, and, like his hyper-loquacious protagonist Tamma, it’s a lot to take—at first. But you settle in, or maybe buckle…
Felix Scheinberger
Felix Scheinberger has drawn more than fifty children’s books, and he wrote this to get people over the fear of the blank page. His stance is that a sketchbook belongs to you and nobody else, so there’s no wrong way…
David Graeber
The standard story of human civilization development argues we went from small egalitarian bands, to farming, to cities, and then inevitable hierarchy and the state. Graeber, an anthropologist, and Wengrow, an archaeologist, spent ten years arguing that’s baloney. Evidence shows…
Philip J. Corso
Corso was a retired Army colonel who ran a Pentagon foreign technology desk and in 1997 he published the claim that he was handed a filing cabinet of debris recovered at Roswell in 1947 and quietly fed the pieces to…
Leonardo Sciascia
A man is shot dead boarding a bus in a Sicilian town square in front of forty people and by the time the carabinieri arrive nobody saw anything. Captain Bellodi, a northerner and a former partisan, investigates, which means construction…
Melissa Broder
A woman drives out of Los Angeles to a Best Western in the high desert, supposedly to work on her novel, but actually to get away from her father, who’s been in the ICU for months and died and been…
Yume Kitasei
Eighty crew members, all women and nonbinary, on a ship carrying humanity’s last real hope to a habitable planet, ten years out from Earth. An explosion during a spacewalk kills three of them and knocks the ship off course, and…
