21 books
George Saunders
A fox teaches himself human by lurking under a window while a mother reads bedtime stories, so the whole thing comes at you in his spelling — Yuman, storys, grate. Then a mall goes up over the woods. The food…
Jason Matthews
The last of the Dominika Egorova spy trilogy, finished as Matthews was dying. Russian intelligence has a mole of its own, in place for decades and about to be appointed to run the CIA, and double-agent Dominika is the only…
Ling Ma
Candace Chen works a dead-end job in New York coordinating the production of specialty Bibles in Chinese factories. Shen Fever arrives — a fungal infection that doesn’t kill people so much as lock them into repeating one familiar routine forever,…
Peter Heller
Celine is sixty-eight, blue-blooded, a Sarah Lawrence grad, with an apartment under the Brooklyn Bridge, a cigarette habit that gave her emphysema, and a better record finding missing people than the FBI. She takes cases about lost families because of…
Ken Ilgunas
Ilgunas walked the Keystone XL route across the Plains, most of it on other people’s land, and came out with a question: When did Americans lose the run of their own country? His answer is that they had it and…
Richard Powers
I was skeptical about this book, with its nine human characters, sprawling timeline from nineteenth century New York to Occupy Wall Street, and magical realism meets science fiction meets eco-terrorism fable. Wait, what? But Richard Powers, who’s won a National…
David Roberts
Written after a cancer diagnosis at seventy-three, and it’s Roberts taking stock of a life of risk and asking what exploration was ever for. He goes through the history — polar travel, the Amazon, the great cave systems, first ascents…
Craig Childs
Craig Childs went looking for the first people in the Americas by walking the ground they walked, back when the map looked nothing like it does now. Sea level was four hundred feet lower, an ice sheet sat on Canada,…
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…
Carl Hoffman
Two men, thirty years apart. Bruno Manser, a Swiss shepherd who walked into the Sarawak rainforest in 1984, lived six years with the nomadic Penan, then led their blockades against the logging companies and became a wanted man before vanishing…
