Impossible Owls: Essays from the Ends of the Earth

Touching upon sumo wrestlers, migrating vultures in Pennsylvania, tiger tourism in India, and, briefly, Star Trek: Enterprise, this collection of eight essays by Grantland and MTV News writer Brian Phillips roams widely across the globe and human experience. Wandering from sports writing to travel journalism to pop culture commentary, Impossible Owls perches somewhere between the warm humor of David Sedaris and the sharp social observations of Chuck Klosterman. While there are actual owls, the heart of these essays is the eyes-wide-open investigation of humanity in terrain both wildly remote and suburban. In Lost Highway,” we meet professed alien abductees and explore forgotten towns along Route 66. “Out in the Great Alone” takes us on the Iditarod, but we spend more time with the locals than the racers. Owls is fun and curious, inviting us to consider that for all its shrinking, our modern world remains at least a little untamed and wonderfully strange.