The natural world is where I feel at home, and it is also the focus of my work as a writer. In Virginia, where I grew up, I always felt calmest walking footpaths in the mountains. Now I live on a windswept island in Scotland, my little aging caravan a couple of dozen feet from crashing waves. I have always felt curious about how we shape our surroundings and how our surroundings shape us. As a writer and a reader, I probe these questions every day.
This is one of those books that is so dense with surprising and counterintuitive facts that I have found myself quoting it regularly for years. It upended my thinking about the way the world we live in is distributed and the manner in which we tell ourselves stories of change.
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability--at the level of literature, history, and politics--to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today's climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the…
As a child, I sometimes sensed the problems of the world and felt an anger at my helplessness to solve them.
The first time I read Kincaid’s writing, I was struck by the way in which she captured those feelings of frustration. She channels a well-worded rage at the ruling class, in this case focused on the treatment—socially, culturally, and environmentally—of Antigua.
From the author of AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RIVER and ANNIE JOHN, a novel set in Antigua, where the idyllic tourist facade hides a colonial legacy of corruption, remedial social investment, and disenfranchised local culture. First published in 1988.
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
The books I love the most are the ones that break patterns and speak disruptively, that take on deeply specific perspectives, and that challenge me to pay attention to individual words.
The voice of the narrator in Sinha’s novel is totally arresting: raw and brutal. The result is an immersion into the human costs of environmental degradation.
Ever since he can remember, Animal has gone on all fours, the catastrophic result of what happened on That Night when, thanks to an American chemical company, the Apocalypse visited his slum. Now not quite twenty, he leads a hand-to-mouth existence with his dog Jara and a crazy old nun called Ma Franci, and spends his nights fantasising about Nisha, the daughter of a local musician, and wondering what it must be like to get laid.
When a young American doctor, Elli Barber, comes to town to open a free clinic for the still suffering townsfolk - only to find…
In an afterword, Dillard writes that, as she aged, she came to regret the grandeur of the sentences in this book. But I’m grateful that she wrote it—a chronicle of two years in the Shenandoah Valley—exactly as she did.
I carry this book around like a bible, reading its paragraphs like poems.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has continued to change people's lives for over thirty years. A passionate and poetic reflection on the mystery of creation with its beauty on the one hand and cruelty on the other, it has become a modern American literary classic in the tradition of Thoreau. Living in solitude in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Roanoke, Virginia, and observing the changing seasons, the flora and fauna, the author reflects on the nature of creation and of the God who set it in motion. Whether the images are cruel or lovely, the language is memorably beautiful and poetic,…
When Jennifer Shea married Russel Redmond, they made a decision to spend their honeymoon at sea, sailing in Mexico. The voyage tested their new relationship, not just through rocky waters and unexpected weather, but in all the ways that living on a twenty-six-foot sailboat make one reconsider what's truly important.…
No one describes the natural world like Elizabeth Bishop does. She writes with clarity about the way humans look at the world and travel through it. Her writing is pungent and economical.
When I want to describe a natural feature or feeling, I sometimes ask myself, “What would Elizabeth Bishop say?”
This is the definitive centenary edition of the work of one of America's greatest poets, recognised today as a master of her art and acclaimed by poets and readers alike. Her poems display honesty and humour, grief and acceptance, observing nature and human nature with painstaking accuracy. They often start outwardly, with geography and landscape - from New England and Nova Scotia, where Bishop grew up, to Florida and Brazil, where she later lived - and move inexorably toward the interior, exploring questions of knowledge and perception, love and solitude, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos.…
Growing up, I wanted to be a farmer. I loved holding dirt and picking weeds. I remember, in my grandmother’s toolshed, little bags of fertilizers made from animal remains. She had phosphorus in the form of bonemeal. That stuck with me. Over the years, phosphorus has come into my life repeatedly: as a fertilizer that I used, as a pollutant in the rivers where I grew up, as a mineral mined around refugee camps that I visited in 2018.
This is a book about the strange ways phosphorus enters our lives. It is a book about cycles of life and death on a planet that is continually rotting and remaking itself. I hope it evokes the wonder that the natural world makes me feel.
Diary of a Citizen Scientist
by
Sharman Apt Russell,
Citizen Scientist begins with this extraordinary statement by the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, “Study any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than anyone else on the planet.”
As the author chases the obscure Western red-bellied tiger beetle across New…
Harris Maloub, a killer with an erased official past, now in his fifties, is visited by someone who could not be alive and given an assignment. In Aarhus, Denmark, Jens Erik, police officer on pre-retirement leave, somehow cannot forget the body of a Black man recovered from the sea some…
