A near-future British government has time travel and no idea what to do with it, so it pulls a handful of people out of history moments before they would have died and assigns each one a “bridge” — a civil…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
David Abram
Abram’s first book and the argument the rest of his work rests on. He apprenticed himself to traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal, expecting to talk about magic, and found their real work was keeping relations square with the land.…
Mary Doria Russell
A radio telescope picks up singing from Alpha Centauri, and the Jesuits — who have been doing astronomy and first contact for four centuries — quietly fund and crew the first mission. Eight people go. One comes back, mutilated and…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
His first book, and the roughest. Jacques Bernis flies the Toulouse–Dakar mail run down the coast of Africa, over the Spanish Sahara where a forced landing means capture, and the narrator is a friend at one of the desert waystations…
Sally Hepworth
Pippa and Gabe move their family to a cottage on a cliff in coastal Australia — a beautiful spot with an ugly reputation, because people come there to jump. Gabe has talked several of them down, which has made him…
Bruce Chatwin
Chatwin went to central Australia to find out how Aboriginal songlines work — the invisible tracks across the country laid down by ancestral beings, sung into being, where the melody carries the shape of the land so a man can…
Andrea Mara
A woman in the bath hears something above the ceiling, watches the attic hatch swing down, and a masked figure drops through. Thirty seconds later she’s dead. Across town her estranged friend Julia sees a video online of a masked…
Jess Walter
Rhys Kinnick blew up his life seven years ago and has been living off the grid in the woods of eastern Washington, no phone, no news, growing his own food and stewing. Then his granddaughter and grandson turn up at…
Yasunari Kawabata
A wealthy Tokyo dilettante named Shimamura takes the train through a long tunnel into the mountains of Niigata, where the snow piles up higher than the houses, and stays at a hot spring inn. There he takes up with Komako,…
