Mexico & Central America

Andrés Reséndez reconstructs the journey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who was shipwrecked on the Texas coast in 1528 and spent eight years walking across the continent. A survival story so improbable it reads like fiction — except every detail is documented.

The first volume of McCarthy's Border Trilogy follows two young Texans who ride into Mexico in 1949 looking for a way of life that's already vanishing. The horsemanship is real. The landscape is merciless. The prose is some of the finest in the English language.

Paul Wilson's account of a surf trip to Mexico that went catastrophically wrong. Crime, corruption, and the thin line between adventure and disaster. A cautionary tale told at full speed.

McCarthy's anti-western is the most violent novel in American literature and also one of the most beautiful. Set in the borderlands of the 1850s, it follows a band of scalp hunters through a landscape so vast and indifferent it becomes its own character. Not a book about nature — a book about what happens to people in nature's absence.

Like most runners, journalist Christopher McDougall found himself plagued by a parade of injuries. Unlike most runners, he decided to seek a cure—and test his own limits—deep within the folds of Mexico’s Copper Canyon region. What he learned, both from scientists and from the expert (and injury-free) long-haul runners of the canyon’s indigenous Tarahumara tribe, sparked the minimalist running revolution—and eventually, the maximalist whiplash that followed.

Richard Grant traveled into the Sierra Madre of Mexico — a region controlled by drug cartels, where the Tarahumara run and the law doesn't reach. Dangerous, vivid, and written by a man who kept going when common sense said stop.

Allan Weisbecker sold everything and drove from New York to Central America looking for an old surfing buddy and perfect waves. What he found was murkier — drugs, corruption, and the realization that you can't surf your way out of middle age.

Paul Theroux drove the length of the U.S.-Mexico border and deep into Mexico, talking to migrants, cartel survivors, factory workers, and priests. Theroux at his most engaged — the cynicism replaced by something closer to grief.

The second McCarthy border novel — a young man crosses into Mexico to return a wolf to the wild. The wolf doesn't survive. Neither does the old world McCarthy is eulogizing. The prose is as good as anything written in the twentieth century.

The book’s title refers to a region along the Arizona-Mexico border that’s so hot, bleak, and unforgiving that even Border Patrol agents generally keep their distance. It’s here, in May 2001, that coyotes guide over two-dozen immigrants hoping to launch a better life into the United States—and it’s here that more than half of them die. Urrea’s gripping, Pulitzer Prize-nominated telling manages to humanize an issue that’s long been a political lightning rod.

Theroux's novel about an American inventor who drags his family to the Honduran jungle to build a utopia. It goes wrong in every possible way. A dark comedy about American arrogance in the tropics.

Seventy days paddling the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico — through the border country, the canyons, and the politics that make this river the most contested waterway in America.

Beamish built a boat and sailed it down the Baja California coast, surfing the points along the way. Handmade craft, handmade journey. The slowest possible way to cover the distance.