21 books
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,…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Huw Lewis-Jones put this together for the 300th birthday of Robinson Crusoe. The setup is simple: He handed a bunch of illustrators from all over the world the same assignment Defoe gave himself — you washed up somewhere, now draw…
Lisa Phillips
In 1995, the Whitney Museum of American Art hung a show arguing that the Beats weren’t just a few novelists and a poem — they were a whole visual and cultural movement; this is the catalog for that show. The…
Michael R. Canfield
Anyone who’s contemplated keeping a nature journal knows the paralysis of structuring a blank book. Here, a dozen field scientists open their notebooks and give you a peek. There are George Schaller’s pages from the Serengeti lions and the pandas…
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…
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…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane found that a children’s dictionary had cut words like acorn, bluebell, and kingfisher to make room for broadband and cut-and-paste, and this book is his answer. Nine chapters, each on a landscape and a writer who saw it clearly…
Peter Turchi
Turchi’s premise is that a writer is a cartographer — you decide what to include, what scale to work at, where to put the edges, and how much blank space to leave for the reader. He runs it through actual…
George R. Stewart
This book outlines where every major American place name came from, told as a narrative rather than a dictionary. Stewart runs the whole sweep — Native words remade by the English, Spanish saints, French traders, Dutch New York, the Puritans…
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…
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…
Roland Allen
A history of the blank book, and it’s better than that sounds. Allen starts in medieval Italy, where merchants worked out double-entry bookkeeping and needed something to keep it in, and paper had just gotten cheap enough. From there the…
Gary Snyder
Nine essays, and the central move is to separate wilderness from wildness. Wilderness is a legal designation; wildness is a quality of self-organizing process, present in an old-growth forest and equally in your own body and in language. Snyder writes…
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…
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.…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Maps of places that don’t exist and essays by the writers who made them. Treasure Island, Middle-earth, Narnia, Earthsea, Winnie-the-Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood, Discworld, and plenty more, reproduced large. Philip Pullman, Robert Macfarlane, Frances Hardinge, Cressida Cowell, David Mitchell, Joanne…
Kory Stamper
Kory Stamper spent decades writing dictionaries at Merriam-Webster, and she kept getting stuck on the color entries in Webster’s Third, which are gloriously nuts. Begonia is defined as a deep pink that’s bluer than fiesta and stronger than sweet william.…
Patrick Syme
Before color charts, naturalists had no shared vocabulary, so a German mineralogist named Abraham Werner built one and the Scottish painter Patrick Syme expanded it in 1814 — 110 colors, each with a hand-painted swatch and three references: A mineral,…
Ian McEwan
The year is 2119, most of Britain is under water and reduced to an archipelago, and an academic named Thomas Metcalfe has built his career on a lost poem — read aloud once at a dinner party in 2014, never…
Keith H. Basso
Keith Basso spent decades at Cibecue, Arizona, and the idea for the book sparked when an elder asked him to make a map with the real names on it. Apache place names turn out to be whole sentences — water…
Diana M. Raab
I’m a confessed notebook, sketchbook, and journal nerd, so I consume books like this like a bottomless barrel of gummi bears. It’s twenty-six writers on what they actually do with a notebook. Sue Grafton, Dorianne Laux, Kim Stafford, John Dufresne,…
