5 books
Fernanda Melchor
The body of the Witch is found in an irrigation canal outside a Mexican village called La Matosa, and the novel works outward from there through five people connected to the killing — a teenage girl, a boy, a mother,…
Solvej Balle
Tara Selter, an antiquarian book dealer, wakes up and it is the eighteenth of November. It is the eighteenth of November again the next day, and the next, and it doesn’t stop. She isn’t looking for a way out and…
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is the poet who worked Sierra trail crews and fire lookouts, spent a decade in a Kyoto Zen monastery, and later won the Pulitzer for Turtle Island. The Back Country, 1968, is four sections that map his life…
W.G. Sebald
A man walks the coast of Suffolk, England, and the walk keeps opening into other things. A skull, a herring fishery, Thomas Browne’s missing remains, the silk trade, Joseph Conrad in the Congo, the Taiping rebellion, a collapsing country house,…
Patti Smith
Patti Smith wrote this in her forties, a short book about being a child in southern New Jersey — the fields behind the house, the woolgatherers she imagined moving through them at dusk, a slaughterhouse, a cloud museum, her brother…
