Scribner

Annie Proulx's epic novel traces two families across 300 years of North American deforestation. It begins in the forests of New France in 1693 and ends in the present, and its argument is both historical and urgent: we have been cutting trees since the day we arrived, and we have not stopped.

Searching for a Northeast polar passage from Europe to China, sixteenth century Dutch navigator William Barents and his crew of sixteen made a few attempts to sail through the Arctic, going farther than any Europeans had before. Proving that the third time is not always the charm, in the winter of 1596 they became stranded, stuck hard in the sea ice off of Nova Zembla, two hundred miles north of Siberia. Barents and his men built a cabin from their boat’s salvaged lumber—ominously, their sole carpenter perished before construction had even begun—and hunkered down for a year of desperate survival, keeping the constant threats of polar bears, frostbite, hunger, and one another at bay. Journalist Andrea Pitzer ventured to the Arctic more than once to track this story, studying Barents’ ship log and other direct accounts from his crew. Icebound is an engrossing, bone-chilling history, an open porthole into the dreams and nightmares of the great Age of Exploration.

Barry Lopez's study of wolves — their biology, their mythology, and humanity's centuries-long war against them. Published in 1978, it helped change how Americans thought about predators. The research is deep and the writing is Lopez at full power.

A decade in a remote cabin in the Colorado Rockies — solitude, snowstorms, bears, and the slow process of making a home in a place that doesn't make it easy.

A surf noir novel set in Huntington Beach — murder, drugs, and waves. Dark, propulsive, and the best fictional treatment of Southern California surf culture ever written.

The subtitle summarizes its engrossing, fast-paced storyline, but The Emerald Mile is much more than a run-of-the-mill adventure yarn. It’s a substantive history lesson of the West’s past and present: Coronado’s 14th-century expedition to the Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell’s first descent of the Colorado, the United States’ river-damming efforts (and the ensuing pushback from Ed Abbey et.al.), the culture of river guiding in the West, and more. It’s an adventure classic that stealthy educates and never bores.

Lopez's short fiction — spare, mysterious stories set in landscapes where the natural world presses against the human. Each story is a small window into a larger wilderness.