Enka grows up on the poor side of a walled city in Florida, gets a scholarship to an elite art school, and immediately fixes on Mathilde, the prodigy everyone else is afraid to approach. Mathilde is genuinely great and genuinely…
Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver took David Copperfield, moved it to Lee County in the far southwest corner of Virginia, and leaned on Dickens for the rest. Damon Fields, called Demon, is born on the floor of a single-wide to a teenage mother who’s…
Edwin Corle
Erskine Caldwell got the idea for a series of books about American regions after coming home from covering the German invasion of Russia, and this was the first one out, in 1941. Edwin Corle got the desert — Nevada, Arizona,…
Raymond B. Cowles
Raymond Cowles grew up in South Africa, studied at UCLA, and more or less invented the study of how cold-blooded animals manage their own body heat — the reason we know a lizard moves between sun and shade to hold…
Edward Abbey
Abbey spent two seasons as a ranger at Arches in the late fifties, alone in a trailer at the end of a dirt road, before the pavement came. This is what he made of it, and it isn’t a nature…
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…
Edmund C. Jaeger
In 1946, Edmund Jaeger was poking around a canyon in the Chuckwalla Mountains when he found a poorwill wedged in a rock crevice, cold and unresponsive, and it stayed that way for weeks. Nobody thought birds could hibernate. He went…
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…
Jack Kerouac
Kerouac wrote this right after On the Road, and it’s the calmer and better book. Ray Smith is Kerouac and Japhy Ryder is Gary Snyder, who was then a young poet in Berkeley translating Han Shan and heading for a…
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…
Frida Kahlo
This is last ten years of her life in her own hand — a facsimile of the journal she kept from about 1944, reproduced in full color, so you can see the actual pages. There are watercolor and ink drawings,…
Beatriz Serrano
From the very first page of Discontent, the funny and sardonic debut novel by Spanish writer Beatriz Serrano, lyrics from Portugal. The Man’s “Purple Yellow Red & Blue” lodged in my head and stayed for the duration of the book:…
Peter Heller
One of my favorite books, full stop. It’s nine years after a pandemic, the location a small airport at the base of the Colorado Rockies. Hig (Big Hig to his friends) lives in a compound with his beloved dog, Jasper,…
Ann Zwinger
Zwinger went down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon over and over, in every season and just about every kind of boat, usually tagging along with scientists doing river studies. She calls herself an observer at the river’s brim, and…
Jeremy Collins
Collins was shivering in a cave under Fitz Roy in Patagonia when he got the idea: Go out from home in each of the four directions, climb something new, and fill sketchbooks doing it. He told his friend and mentor…
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…
Jason Dove Mark
Working as an organic farmer, activist, and editor of Sierra magazine, Jason Dove Mark has spent twenty-five years trying to make the world more livable. In his second book, which weaves memoir with science, he’s concluded the biggest obstacle to…
Ellen Meloy
Meloy lived on the San Juan River in Southeast Utah and spent four seasons watching a band of about eighty desert bighorn on the cliffs near her house — sheep she called the Blue Door Band. They’d been written off…
Kevin Fedarko
In June 1983, the snowpack came off the Rockies faster than anyone predicted and Glen Canyon Dam started to come apart, spillways cavitating, plywood bolted onto the top to hold the reservoir back. With the Grand Canyon closed to boats…
Nick Pope
Two days after Christmas 1980, security police at the twin American air bases at Bentwaters and Woodbridge in Suffolk, England, saw lights come down in the pines between them and went out to look. Jim Penniston says he walked up…
D.W. Pasulka
This is Diana Pasulka’s follow-up to American Cosmic and she casts a wide net. Nonhuman intelligence here doesn’t just mean whatever’s flying around — it covers angels, demons, animals, AI, the things people meet in dreams, and the possibility that…
John McPhee
McPhee’s takes David Brower, the head of the Sierra Club and the most effective conservationist alive, and drops him in the field with three men who want to use the land, one at a time, then writes down what happens.…
Matt Warshaw
Warshaw spent years assembling this — fifteen hundred entries covering surfers, breaks, board designers, films, magazines, contests, terminology, and the odd corners nobody else bothered with. It’s alphabetical and it’s browsable to a dangerous degree: You look up one thing…
Evelyn Clarke
A locked-room mystery published under the pseudonym Evelyn Clarke, which is V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke writing together. Arthur Fletch, a reclusive bestselling novelist, invites six struggling midlist authors — one each from thriller, romance, YA, sci-fi, horror — to…
Josh Jackson
Los Angeles-based furniture maker Josh Jackson had never heard of the Bureau of Land Management and wasn’t all that clear on “public lands”—he just wanted a last-minute place to camp. Then a friend mentioned “BLM lands” and he fell down…
