Essays

Laura and Guy Waterman's collection of climbing stories from the mountains of the American Northeast. The Watermans were the conscience of New England mountaineering — their writing is as precise and unforgiving as a winter ascent of Mount Washington.

John Gierach is the best fishing writer alive. This collection of essays about fly fishing in Colorado and beyond is vintage Gierach: dry, wry, and populated with the kind of characters who drive hours for a rumor of trout. Nobody captures the obsession better.

Aldo Leopold's collection of essays from the 1940s is the foundational text of the American conservation movement. Written from his weekend shack in rural Wisconsin, it builds from close observation of cranes and wildflowers to the land ethic — the idea that humans are not conquerors of the land but citizens of it.

Rick Bass writes about hunting, family, and the Texas Hill Country with the same lyrical intensity he brings to everything. Four generations of deer hunters, one landscape, and the question of what it means to take a life from a place you love.

Ian Mitchell and Dave Brown on Scottish hillwalking — the culture, the characters, the politics of access, and the landscapes that make Scotland's mountains unlike any others. Opinionated and uncompromising.

Abbey's collection of aphorisms, epigrams, and provocations — distilled from his journals. Some are brilliant. Some are deliberately outrageous. All of them sound like Abbey talking after his third beer, which is exactly the point.

A collection of Leopold's wilderness writings, drawn from his essays, letters, and field journals. Complements A Sand County Almanac with deeper cuts — the conservation philosophy in earlier, rougher form.

Terry Tempest Williams's essay collection about desire, wildness, and the body's relationship to landscape. The writing is sensual and fierce. Williams doesn't separate the erotic from the ecological — they're the same hunger.

Elena Passarello's essays about famous animals — from the first dog in space to the last passenger pigeon to a celebrity bear. Each essay is a marvel of form and research, and together they ask what it means that we name animals, mourn them, and still can't stop killing them.

Robin Wall Kimmerer weaves together indigenous wisdom and botanical science to argue that plants and people are meant to be in relationship. Each essay is an act of attention — to moss, to strawberries, to the grammar of animacy in the Potawatomi language. The book that made a generation rethink what it means to be a naturalist.

Rick Bass writes about the Yaak Valley of Montana — the wildest place in the Lower 48 — and the fight to protect it. Bass has spent decades arguing for the Yaak's wilderness designation. These essays are the sound of a man who won't stop.

Ed Douglas's sharp, funny, and critical essays about Himalayan climbing and the culture that surrounds it. Douglas is one of the best mountaineering journalists alive, and he's not afraid to puncture the mythology.

Abbey's journals, published posthumously. Raw, unfiltered, sometimes ugly, always alive. This is Abbey without the craft — the notebook version of the man who wrote Desert Solitaire. Essential for anyone who loves his work and wants to see the machinery behind it.

Paul Kingsnorth's essays about giving up on mainstream environmentalism and finding something harder and more honest in its place. Kingsnorth argues that most green activism is just another form of progress worship. Uncomfortable, necessary, beautifully written.

Barry Lopez's essay collection roams from the Arctic to the Sonoran Desert, from stone horse intaglios to the relationship between landscape and imagination. Each essay is a small, precise act of attention. Lopez at his most accessible.

Outer Hebrides. Marshall Islands. Haida Gwaii. Tanzania. Vanuatu. Madagascar. Russia. Oregon-based writer Michael Kew heeds the siren song of hard-to-reach locales as few do, and his book Crossings pulls together thirty-five true stories earned from a decade of global surf travel. 400+ pages might seem daunting, but Kew, who’s been likened to Paul Theroux and Jack Kerouac, writes with such an uncanny ear for people and places even non-surfers will be stricken with wanderlust: “Peering into the flames, I wedged my elbows comfortably between driftwood scree, shoes stirring the coarse, gray beach sand. Opposite the fire pit, through the torquing yellows and oranges, sat new friend Roderic: Burly, stubble-faced and densely clothed, alternating between beer and cigarette, he looked more like a typical commercial fisherman than surfer. Yet this was no typical surfscape.” Real adventure travel—the kind that isn’t comfortable, safe, or easily consumed—reminds us that while the world can seem small at times, it remains a very, very big place.

Joe Simpson — of Touching the Void fame — on the ethics of high-altitude mountaineering. Written after witnessing dying climbers being stepped over on Everest, it's a furious indictment of the commercialization of the world's highest peaks.

Jamie Brisick's essays on surf culture — the style, the characters, the places where surfing intersects with art, music, and literature. Brisick writes about surfing the way a jazz critic writes about music.

Amy Irvine's response to Desert Solitaire — a woman's reckoning with Abbey's legacy, the modern West, and what it means to love a landscape that's being loved to death. Sharp, personal, and willing to take on the old man.

Two of Lopez's slimmest, most mysterious books, published together. Prose poems disguised as field notes, or field notes elevated to prose poetry. The desert and river landscapes are real but also interior — Lopez writing at his most compressed and luminous.

Edward Abbey spent two seasons as a ranger at Arches National Monument in the late 1950s and wrote the book that defined the literature of the American desert. It's cantankerous, beautiful, politically furious, and deeply in love with red rock and silence. The chapter on floating the Colorado River before the dams is an elegy for a world that no longer exists.

Abbey floating rivers across the American West, ranting and rhapsodizing in equal measure. Part travelogue, part environmental polemic, entirely Abbey. The Glen Canyon chapter is a eulogy for a drowned landscape.

Ellen Meloy spent years tracking desert bighorn sheep across the canyonlands of Utah. This is her account — lyrical, digressive, deeply strange, and animated by a love for wild animals so intense it borders on obsession. Meloy died before the book was published.

Krakauer's collection of adventure essays — climbing the Eiger, ice fishing in Alaska, descending into the Carlsbad Caverns — established the voice that would carry Into Thin Air and Into the Wild. The essay on the Stikine ice cap is as good as anything he's written.

Terry Tempest Williams could write a grocery list that speaks truth to power. In this new collection of essays from one of America’s most devoted defenders of public lands, she examines the nature of erosion—on our riverbanks and desert mesas, but also on us. Is it destruction or metamorphosis when we’re shaped by the elements of wind and fire, time and truth? And what of democracy, weathered by storms? In these stories, we visit with the native peoples of Bears Ears National Monument, the owls that swoop by Williams’s porch, and protestors, politicians, and prairie dogs—singular characters, all. We consider policy and spirituality, the suicide of a brother, the rockslides of desecration. But even through the despair, these essays rise to a hymn, a summons to howl. Erosion is a tonic, like the landscape of the Colorado Plateau, of which Williams says: “One drinks deeply from this well-spring of wonder, especially in drought.”

David Roberts's collection of adventure essays spanning four decades. From Alaskan first ascents to archaeological mysteries in the Southwest, Roberts writes with the authority of someone who has been both participant and chronicler.

Paul Theroux's essays about people and places — from Africa to the American South. Theroux is one of the great travel writers, and these pieces show his range: sharp observation, occasional cruelty, and a refusal to romanticize.

Terry Tempest Williams mosaic-making in Ravenna, prairie dog research in Utah, genocide aftermath in Rwanda. Three seemingly unrelated subjects braided into a meditation on pattern, destruction, and the human need to assemble meaning from fragments.

Sebastian Junger's short book about wildfire in the American West, Hopi fire ceremonies, and the culture of hotshot crews. Compact and intense, with the same narrative velocity that powered The Perfect Storm.

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.

Nan Shepherd's poems about the mountains she wrote about in The Living Mountain. Slighter than the prose, but animated by the same intensity of attention.

Geoff Powter's history of Canadian mountaineering — from the railroad surveyors to the modern alpine elite. The Rockies and the Coast Range as seen by the people who climbed them first.

Robert Macfarlane's glossary of landscape language drawn from the British Isles — words for weather, water, earth, and stone that are disappearing from common use. A companion piece to Wild Words, and one of the inspirations for it.

David Roberts's meditation on exploration, risk, and the approaching end of his own life — written after a terminal cancer diagnosis. Forty years of adventure distilled into a farewell. Roberts at his most reflective and personal.

John Soennichsen's collection of stories from Death Valley — the people, the history, the extreme environment. A portrait of the hottest, driest, lowest place in North America and the strange attraction it holds.

Greg Child's collected climbing writing — from Himalayan expeditions to Australian rock. Child is one of the best writer-climbers of his generation, and these pieces capture the full range of mountaineering experience.

Annie Dillard spent a year watching the natural world around a creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. What she produced is less nature writing than nature theology — a mystic's journal of attention so fierce it borders on violence. The prose is extraordinary. The seeing is harder.

Collected letters — to friends, enemies, editors, and the government. The private Abbey, funnier and more tender than the public one, still furious about the same things.

Collected climbing writing from expeditions across four continents. Witty, self-deprecating, and technically informed — the best kind of climbing journalism.

Essays about the red rock desert of southern Utah — its ecology, its politics, its hold on the imagination. The desert as lover, as teacher, as the thing that won't let go.

“I have just stapled my hair to the roof,” begins Seasons, a glimmer of the wry wit to come in this posthumous collection of writing from the late Ellen Meloy. Originally recorded as audio stories for NPR Utah in the 1990s, these essays evoke the Colorado Plateau and Southwest canyon country Meloy called home and muse. As with her Pulitzer-shortlisted The Anthropology of Turquoise and Eating Stone, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Meloy is funny and insightful as she links humans and nature in surprising ways. From the profound beauty of Navajo culture milling about the post office to the admirable anarchy of little old ladies in Buicks, not much escaped Meloy’s observant eye for sifting connections out of the finest grains of redrock dust. Annie Proulx’s foreword and Meloy’s own illustrations help anchor this feather of a book, a slight 94 pages, into a vessel steadfast and endearing.

Essays about the obsessive life of the fly fisher — the rivers, the hatches, the solitude, and the nagging suspicion that all this time on the water means something beyond catching fish. The title says everything about the tone.

Travels among indigenous cultures in Borneo, Haiti, the Amazon, and the high Arctic — each journey an encounter with a radically different way of being human. The fieldwork that fed decades of books and lectures.

Childs at his most extreme — solo desert travel in the canyonlands of the Southwest, sleeping in alcoves, following water through slot canyons where no water should be. The landscape is the character; the human is just passing through.

Essays about rock climbing, landscape, and the places where vertical stone meets human ambition. Literary climbing writing from a voice that deserves wider recognition.

Life in bush Alaska — subsistence hunting, extreme cold, and the slow encroachment of the modern world on a place that resists it. Kantner grew up in the Arctic and writes about it with the authority of someone who never left.

Dillard's essay collection — shorter and stranger than Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and in some ways more powerful. Each essay is an act of attention so concentrated it feels like prayer.

Dillard's selected essays, drawn from across her career. The best introduction to her work — from Tinker Creek to the Arctic to the writing desk. The prose is a force of nature.

Childs on the animals he's encountered in the wild — mountain lions, grizzlies, ravens, rattlesnakes. Each essay is a close encounter rendered with the intensity of someone who gets closer than most people dare.

Meloy's essays about color, landscape, and the sensory experience of being alive in the desert. The turquoise is literal — the stone, the water, the sky — and metaphorical. Nobody wrote about the desert's palette like Meloy.

Selected writing spanning the career — from The End of Nature to climate activism. The evolution of America's most important environmental writer, from quiet essayist to arrested protester.

Bass's manifesto for the Yaak Valley — the last wild valley in Montana, under constant threat from logging. Part nature writing, part plea, part rage. Bass has been fighting for this place for thirty years.

Frazier on fishing — which means Frazier on rivers, weather, patience, and the particular pleasure of standing in water trying to outsmart something with a brain the size of a pea.

Ehrlich on the Arctic — glaciers, climate change, and the dissolution of the frozen world. Written with a poet's grief and a naturalist's precision.

Williams visits twelve national parks and writes about each one as a meditation on American identity, public land, and what we choose to preserve. Personal, political, and unapologetically in love with the idea of public wilderness.

Meloy's final book — essays about nuclear testing, endangered species, and the contradictions of living in a landscape that is both beautiful and bombed. The desert as contested ground.

British author Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the introduction to the 2011 edition of this classic, is no slouch for words, but he struggled to label The Living Mountain, calling it a “formidably difficult book to describe.” He comes close when he offers “field-note, memoir, natural history, and philosophical meditation,” but what Nan Shepherd’s tidy book really is is a love letter to her beloved Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland. Her observations are as sharp the first fall frost, her words as clear as a high mountain stream. The “light is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity,” she writes. John Muir raptured over the Sierra, but Shepherd writes of the Cairngorms with mentholated coolness, and hers is the superior effort, at least when it comes to knowing the “essential nature” that she was seeking from the very first page.

A short, fierce essay about the European plunder of North America — and what a different relationship with the continent might look like. Lopez at his most compressed and political.

Fletcher's collected shorter writing — the man who walked through time, walked through the Grand Canyon, and made the long walk a literary form.

Abbey's collected essays — the best of his shorter nonfiction, from desert solitude to environmental rage to the pleasure of watching a rattlesnake. The one-volume introduction to Abbey's voice.

Ehrlich moved to Wyoming to recover from grief and found a landscape vast enough to hold it. Ranch life, winter storms, and the particular silence of the high plains. One of the essential books about the American West.

Macdonald's essay collection after H Is for Hawk — swifts, wild boar, mushrooms, and the act of paying attention to nonhuman lives. Each essay is a small masterpiece of noticing.

Childs in the desert again — virga that never reaches the ground, bones that last for centuries, and the dry places where life is most concentrated and most fragile.

Shepherd's uncollected essays and fiction — the work beyond The Living Mountain. The same attention, the same mountains, different angles of approach.

Bass's journal of a Montana winter — wood-cutting, snowshoeing, and the particular silence of the Yaak Valley under snow. A small book about a cold season in a wild place.

Remembering a teenage incident, Aimee Nezhukumatathil suggests responding to a would-be friend’s insult like an axolotl, the Mexican salamander that appears serene, yet “when it eats—what a wild mess—when it gathers a tangle of bloodworms into its mouth, you will understand how a galaxy first learns to spin in the dark, and how it begins to grow and grow.” Braiding the microscopic with the universal in her memoir essay collection, World of Wonders, the award-winning poet and American-raised daughter of a Filipino mom and Indian father writes of nature as an elemental part of who we are. With imaginative prose dipping from joyful to bittersweet, Nezhukumatathil reveals lessons about identity, race, love, and family distilled from the navigation of an indigo bunting, the echolocation of a narwhal, or the defensive moves of the touch-me-not plant. This beautifully illustrated little book is one of the best things ever to happen to nature writing.