6 books
Ed Yong
An Immense World delivers miracles on every page. A fly’s vision updates six times faster than a human’s, perhaps rending its perception of our movements in slow motion. Cows’ gazes appear unfocused because they see in a horizontal band and…
Daniel Mason
Miles Krzelewski is 45 and fourteen years into a dissertation on Russian folktales that keeps changing topic every time it gets hard. His wife Kate lands a one-year visiting professorship at a college in Vermont, so the whole family —…
Merlin Sheldrake
Fungi are having a moment. Research shows psychedelics can be a powerful tool to treat mental health issues, and local, state, and federal governments are open to decriminalizing shrooms or exploring medical applications. But, as Merlin Sheldrake enthusiastically shows, fungi…
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…
Imbolo Mbue
How Beautiful We Were is more acutely felt than most of the real-life environmental tragedies that populate today’s headlines. A fictional eco-disaster set in the also fictional African village of Kosawa, Mbue’s second novel eviscerates the hypocrisies and externalized hungers…
Richard Preston
A handful of amateurs discovered in the 1980s that nobody had ever been to the top of a redwood, and that the canopy three hundred feet up is a whole ecosystem — soil, huckleberry bushes, ferns, salamanders that live their…
