Longtime National Geographic photographer David Doubilet has spent more than twenty-seven thousand hours underwater, often in pursuit of the images that have become synonymous with his name: over/unders, above and belows, or, as he calls them, half-and-halfs. Enabled by domed…
Megha Majumdar
It’s set in Kolkata, India, a few decades out, under flood and heat and a food shortage that has markets selling seaweed and synthetic fish. Ma runs a shelter, cares for her elderly father and her two-year-old daughter, and has…
Kiliii Yüyan
A book-length argument for entrusting Indigenous peoples with the land they have stewarded for millennia, and I’m convinced. The statistics do real work here, but it’s Yüyan’s photographs from nine Native communities that actually land the case.
Emma Cline
Alex is twenty-two, broke, running from people in the city she owes money to, and spending August on Long Island with a much older man who is done with her by the second chapter. He puts her on a train.…
Peter Heller
Peter Heller’s novel The River,moved as swiftly and eventfully as class V whitewater, but not all readers were pleased with its denouement (one AJ editor and Heller fan threw his copy against the wall in protest). The Guide, though, will…
Helen Macdonald
A goshawk is the falconer’s hard case — bigger, faster, and less forgiving than a falcon, with a reputation for being impossible to keep steady. Macdonald had been a falconer since childhood and she bought one in Scotland for £800,…
Monroe Robinson
In 1967, at age fifty-one, Dick Proenneke retired from a peripatetic life as a diesel mechanic, salmon fisherman, and repairman and settled in southwest Alaska, where he spent the next thirty years living intimately with the land. A master craftsman,…
Delaney Nolan
Beatrice is twenty-nine and works at Twin Bridge, a broke residential treatment center in a dust-blown East Texas town called Askewn, minding a floor of furious teenage girls who are on too many drugs or not enough. It’s the near…
Ani Katz
Caroline has a newborn, no sleep, and a husband who’s finally landed a job at a Big Tech outfit called Corridor, doing work he won’t talk about for money that fixes everything. He suggests a summer on Haven, the private…
Amity Gaige
How easy is it to get lost when you wander off the Appalachian Trail? Very. This extremely page-turning novel by Amity Gaige veers between the disappearance in Maine’s North Woods of thru-hiker Valerie Gillis, who is just two hundred miles…
Caitlin Mullen
Callie Hauser comes home to the New Jersey Pine Barrens as the new police chief, which in a town this size means everybody she polices knew her as a kid. She makes an arrest that looks routine and it kicks…
James McBride
A skeleton turns up in a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in 1972, and the story goes back to Chicken Hill in the 1920s and 30s — the neighborhood where Jewish immigrants and Black families lived alongside each other on the…
Jessica Knoll
Faye Heron is a Hollywood screenwriter, married to her producing partner, and she owes her whole career to a film professor at the small upstate New York college she attended. He dies, she goes back for the funeral, and there’s…
Jardine Libaire
Lee manages a Tribeca restaurant and runs on cocaine and pink champagne, financed by older men who buy her clothes and cover her rent. She was going to be a painter. She can’t remember the last time she touched a…
Ryan Huling
The premise is a line from American naturalist Henry Beston: Animals aren’t underlings, they’re other nations. Huling takes it literally and spends a year mapping their territories — Canada’s beaver belt, the tunnel complexes of sub-Saharan mole-rats, prairie dog cities…
Gestalten
The follow-up to Rock the Shack, and the pitch is in the title: Buildings you inhabit to not to be found. They’re cabins, huts, treehouses, bothies, and small retreats from around the world, shot well and presented with plans and…
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson has been walking the Sierra Nevada since 1973 and has done something like a hundred trips, and this is everything he knows about it in one enormous, wandering book. Route descriptions and gear lists sit next to the geology…
Matt Warshaw
If sports could wish, every sport wishes it could be treated with the depth, breadth, love, and wit that Matt Warshaw has given surfing. The former editor of Surfer magazine, Warshaw is the preeminent chronicler of surfing history, and no…
Sally Mann
Fine art photographer Sally Mann found boxes in the attic — letters, photographs, court records — and built a memoir out of what was in them. Her father the country doctor and eccentric. Her mother. Gee-Gee, the Black woman who…
Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, eds.
A dictionary of American landscape words, written by forty-five writers instead of lexicographers. Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney handed out the terms and let each writer define them — so Barbara Kingsolver gets some, Antonya Nelson, William Kittredge, Luis Alberto…
Miriam Horn
George Schaller invented the way modern field biology is done, which was mostly to go sit with the animals for years. Born in Berlin in 1933 to an American mother and a Nazi diplomat father, shuttled through occupied countries, he…
M. L. Rio
It’s summer 1989. Ten-year-old Suzanne talks her way onto tour with her father Gil, a metal guitarist one break away from being somebody, and his band the Kills. She’s a music obsessive with a camera and no ability to play,…
Mark Z. Danielewski
A family moves into a house in the Virginia countryside and finds a closet where there wasn’t one, then a hallway, and then they measure the place and discover the inside is a quarter inch bigger than the outside. The…
Craig Childs
The standard story is that the Ancestral Puebloans vanished. Childs walks the actual ground to show they moved. He starts at Chaco and follows the trail out — the great houses at Aztec and Mesa Verde, the roads, the pottery…
Imbolo Mbue
How Beautiful We Were is more acutely felt than most of the real-life environmental tragedies that populate today’s headlines. A fictional eco-disaster set in the also fictional African village of Kosawa, Mbue’s second novel eviscerates the hypocrisies and externalized hungers…
