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,…
Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
When Kahlo died in 1954, Diego Rivera turned the Blue House into a museum but had the rest of her things — clothes, letters, documents, and more than six thousand photographs — locked in the bathrooms and sealed. They stayed…
Jenny Odell
This isn’t a digital detox book, which Odell says up front. She’s an artist who spends a lot of time watching birds in an Oakland rose garden. Her position is that the attention economy is an economy and that refusing…
Julian Brave NoiseCat
NoiseCat’s father, a Secwépemc and St’at’imc carver, left when he was young, and NoiseCat grew up with his non-Native mother in the urban Native community in Oakland, spending time on the Canim Lake reserve in British Columbia. The book is…
Anaïs Nin
Set in Paris, 1931 to 1934. Nin is in her late twenties, married to a banker, in analysis, and just beginning to write, and the diary is her real work. This is the volume where she meets Henry Miller and…
Michael Newton
The first of therapist Michael Newton’s “soul” books, from 1994, and the one that started the whole life-between-lives field. He shares twenty-nine cases, transcribed, of subjects under deep hypnosis describing what happens after death. There’s a passage, a reception by…
Michael Newton
Michael Newton was a counseling psychologist and hypnotherapist in Los Angeles, an atheist when he started, who says he stumbled into this by accident when a client under hypnosis went past a past life and started describing what happened between…
James Nestor
Nestor got himself into a Stanford lab and had a rhinologist plug both his nostrils shut with silicone for ten days, which left him breathing through his mouth and nothing else. His blood pressure spiked, he started snoring 4,000 percent…
Lawrence R. Walker and Frederick H. Landau
This is the only modern natural history of the Mojave, which makes it the standard by default, but it’s also thorough, engaging, and well-written. There’s the geology and how the basins and ranges got there, climate and why so little…
Roderick Nash
This is the book that helped found environmental history as a field. Nash traces what Americans have meant by wilderness — first a wasteland to be conquered, a place of moral danger, then, once it started running out, a national…
Gary Nabhan
Terroir is the wine world’s word for the way a place ends up in the glass — soil, sun, wind, water. Nabhan takes it out of Burgundy and drops it on the Arizona-Sonora border, where he’s spent his life. Mexican…
Kate Murphy
I can’t claim to be a good listener, but I’m a better one after reading this book, which I revisit once a year for a refresher. Murphy is a reporter and listening is her job, and for this project she…
Oliver Morton
Morton is a science writer and this is the moon from every angle at once: how it formed and why that mattered for life here, what Apollo was as a political project, the geology of a dead world and what…
Robert Moor
Moor thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and spent the next several years asking what a trail actually is. So the book goes from fossil traces of the first creatures to move on a seafloor, to ants laying pheromone lines and correcting…
Annie Montgomery Labatt
Annie Labatt taught art history at Texas, did a Rome Prize and a stint at the Met, and between 2013 and 2015 she gave twenty Friday-night lectures at the San Antonio Museum of Art. This book is those talks. One…
Keith McCloskey
In February 1959, nine experienced backcountry skiers died on a slope in the northern Urals. They cut their way out of the tent from the inside and ran into a blizzard at night in bare feet and underwear. Some froze;…
Jared D. Margulies
There’s a global black market in rare cacti and succulents, and Margulies spent years inside it — with collectors, growers, smugglers, customs officers, and conservation scientists across Europe, Asia, Mexico, and South Africa. Plants poached out of the ground in…
Ekkehart Malotki
Almost everybody looking at rock art goes hunting for the pictures — the sheep, the hunters, the spirals with a story attached. (It’s the reason I drive past Mojave scratches to get to Colorado Plateau galleries.) Malotki and Dissanayake point…
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…
Margareta Magnusson
Marie Kondo pushed me, and Magnusson made me jump—that and having to fill two Dumpsters with junk when my dad died. Döstädning is a real Swedish word and a real practice: Going through your things while you’re still able, so…
Robert Macfarlane
Rob Mac tackles what’s under foot, in three parts: what we shelter, what we yield, what we dispose of. He peers into a dark matter lab under a Yorkshire hill, the wood wide web and the fungal networks trading sugar…
Janna Levin
Levin is a cosmologist at Barnard, and this is a short one, about one hundred fifty pages with drawings by Lia Halloran, meant to be read in a sitting. Her opening move is the one that got me: A black…
Natalie Leon
The old Japanese calendar splits the year into twenty-four sekki and then into seventy-two ko — microseasons of about five days each, with names like east wind melts the ice and rotten grass becomes fireflies. Leon studied tea and spent…
Stephen Lekson
Lekson noticed that Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruins, and Paquimé in Chihuahua sit within a few minutes of longitude of one another, hundreds of miles apart, and built at different times from one another over four centuries. His premise is it…
John Muir Laws and Emilie Lygren
The companion to Laws’s Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, and it’s built for anybody leading a group — teachers, naturalists, parents, camp staff. Forty-plus field activities with the actual instructions, timing, and prompts, all organized around three questions…
