The first dirt I tasted was a fistful of siltstone dust outside the house where I was born in the Mojave Desert. When she could, my mother took long walks around the multicolored washes and canyons. Her accounts of the changing light on the rock walls, her encounters with silence and sidewinders, and her accumulating collection of fossils piqued my enthusiasm for earth science and led me to earn a degree in geology. I discovered that deserts drew from me a special quality of attention as my body and mind became a single organ for listening.
The famous opening lines of this book are: “I came to Comala because they told me my father, a man called Pedro Páramo, lived here.” I’ve heard many Mexicans quote the opening paragraph in Spanish. Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize-winning Columbian writer, claimed he could recite the entire book forwards and backward.
Rulfo’s short novel influenced all Latin American fiction written after it. Ghostly, innovative, and mystical, the book takes place in an imaginary desert, a place of barren fields, dusty roads, and cracked earth that mirrors the desolation haunting all of its characters.
"One of the best novels in Hispanic literature, and in literature as a whole.” —Jorge Luis Borges
The highly influential masterpiece of Latin American literature, now published in a new, authoritative translation, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez
A masterpiece of the surreal that influenced a generation of writers in Latin America, Pedro Páramo is the otherworldly tale of one man’s quest for his lost father. That man swears to his dying mother that he will find the father he has never met—Pedro Páramo—but when he reaches the town of Comala, he…
Not in the best of shape but energized by their imaginations, two friends set out with an overabundance of gear (including two eight-thousand dollar cameras, batteries, solar panels, and all sorts of other accessories) to hike all of the 750-mile Grand Canyon.
Starting in the Sonora Desert to the east, they plan to walk along the Great Basin Desert ecosystem of the canyon floor, shambling westward into the Mojave Desert. The heat—bouncing back and forth between canyon walls—reaches 120 degrees, hot enough to “denature and congeal” human blood. What could go wrong?
Fedarko writes about the riveting adventure (an adventure in both hiking and friendship) with humility and grim humor.
Two friends, zero preparation, one dream. From the author of the beloved bestseller The Emerald Mile, a rollicking and poignant account of the epic misadventure of a 750-mile odyssey, on foot, through the heart of America's most magnificent national park and the grandest wilderness on earth.
A few years after quitting his job to follow an ill-advised dream of becoming a guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, the National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand…
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
William Carlos Williams’ book The Desert Music was published first in 1954 and later collected in volume two of New Directions’ The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. It remains one of William Carlos Williams’ most tender, innovative, and emotionally exigent books.
The so-called desert music becomes, among other things, an enactment and valuing of the “inescapable and insistent” background soundscapes in our lives. Geographically, the poems of the title sequence are situated in the Chihuahua Desert, where Williams, after having suffered a stroke, travels between Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas.
From characteristically astute descriptions—for instance, of a twisted wild mustard flower (that I still see in my mind’s eye)—the poems segue into meditations on art, love, and mortality.
So that readers could more fully understand the extent of Williams' radical simplicity, all of his published poetry, excluding Paterson, was reissued in two definite volumes, of which this is the first.
Mary Austin’s truly remarkable book is set in the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts of California. Austin, who (like me) had degrees in science and literature, developed a deep interest in both ecological issues and indigenous practices, particularly those of the Paiute and Hopi.
In this book of poetic, lyrical essays, her finely-tuned attentiveness to the land as a dynamic ecosystem and her accounts of the dialogue between humans and non-humans foreground a major trajectory in environmental literature and advocacy.
Austin has an unaffected, clear-eyed style that blends philosophy, natural history, and storytelling. First published in 1903, the book remains remarkably relevant and moving.
The enduring appeal of the desert is strikingly portrayed in this poetic study, which has become a classic of the American Southwest. First published in 1903, it is the work of Mary Austin (1868-1934), a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and playwright, who was also an ardent early feminist and champion of Indians and Spanish-Americans. She is best known today for this enchanting paean to the vast, arid, yet remarkably beautiful lands that lie east of the Sierra Nevadas, stretching south from Yosemite through Death Valley to the Mojave Desert. Comprising fourteen sketches, the book describes plants, animals, mountains, birds, skies,…
This is Detective Chief Superintendent Fran Harman's first case in a series of six books. Months from retirement Kent-based Fran doesn't have a great life - apart from her work. She's menopausal and at the beck and call of her elderly parents, who live in Devon. But instead of lightening…
The events in this book take place, for the most part, in the Sonora and Chihuahua Deserts. A character-rich indictment of the violence with which the American “West was won,” it is riveting for its relentless pace, its linguistic richness, and its sensual evocation of landscape.
McCarthy can seamlessly shift sentence styles from Shakespearean syntactical grandeur to slivered fragments of the sort that characterize the best of Ernest Hemingway. I was an early fan, but by now, this book has been acknowledged by virtually every major critic as a signal literary masterpiece.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
In just a few years, Gander lost his wife, the poet CD Wright, his mother, and his younger sister. Ungrounded, he accepted the invitation of a new immigrant to this country to hike California’s San Andreas Fault. Gander, who trained as a geologist, found it to be meditative at first—a secular version of walking the stations of the cross. Eventually, they passed through the desolate Mojave Desert town where Gander was born.
As the present mixed with his memories, he began to see the parallel between the rift inside and outside of him. He found himself correlating his tumultuous emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions, the fractures, and folds that underlie not only this country but any self in its relationship with others.
Magnolia Merryweather, a horse breeder, is eager to celebrate Christmas for the first time after the Civil War ended even as she grows her business. She envisions a calm, prosperous life ahead after the terror of the past four years. Only, all of her plans are thrown into disarray when…
It's 1943, and World War II has gripped the nation, including the Stilwell family in Jacksonville, Alabama. Rationing, bomb drills, patriotism, and a changing South barrage their way of life. Neighboring Fort McClellan has brought the world to their doorstep in the form of young soldiers from all over the…
