4 books
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…
Junot Diaz
Díaz’s 2007 first novel, which won the Pulitzer. Oscar de León is an overweight, lovelorn Dominican-American kid in New Jersey — a science fiction and fantasy obsessive who wants, more than anything, to fall in love. The book follows him…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane set out to find what wildness is left in Britain and Ireland, expecting remoteness — islands, summits, moors — and slept out in fifteen of them over a year. Then Roger Deakin, his friend, kept pointing him back toward…
Seth Kantner
Kantner was born in a sod igloo on the Kobuk River to homesteading parents and grew up hunting and trapping among Iñupiaq neighbors in northwest Alaska. This is memoir in photographs and short essays — his father’s pictures and his…
