Culture & Place

Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel interweaves the story of a disabled historian with the frontier adventures of his grandparents in the nineteenth-century West. It's about marriage, landscape, and the compromises that settlement demands.

Huw Lewis-Jones's collection of fictional islands from literature, cartography, and mythology. Beautiful maps, wild stories, and a reminder that the impulse to imagine places that don't exist is as old as the impulse to explore places that do.

Anna Brones's outdoor cookbook — recipes designed for campfires, trail stoves, and backcountry kitchens. Practical, unpretentious, and organized by the kind of trip you're taking.

Justin Farrell's sociology of Teton County, Wyoming — the wealthiest county in America and a case study in what happens when the ultra-rich buy the landscape. Conservation as class privilege. Wilderness as real estate. A book that will make you uncomfortable.

Carolyn Finney examines why American wilderness has been coded as white space — and what that erasure has cost. Part history, part cultural criticism, part personal reckoning. Essential reading for anyone who thinks the outdoors belongs to everyone but hasn't asked why it doesn't feel that way.

Hampton Sides follows Kit Carson across the nineteenth-century West — from the fur trade to the Mexican-American War to the brutal subjugation of the Navajo. It's a page-turner built on a tragedy, and Sides never lets the adventure obscure the violence.

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.

In this spellbinding travel narrative, poet and award-winning journalist Kapka Kassabova returns to her roots in the borderland between Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece. Nestled near the Black Sea and one of Europe’s greatest wildernesses, this rugged corner of the world has been overrun by shifting borders for millennia. From ancient Greece through the Ottoman Empire, to the Cold War and today’s Syrian refugees, the story takes switchbacks between cultures and centuries. One moment you’re sipping coffee with an armed border guard at The Disco cafe, the next you’re firewalking with an old woman carrying religious relics over hot coals. Boars and bears and wolves roam the old-growth beeches and oaks. And snakes, it seems, are everywhere. Is it 2016 or the 4th century BC? This kaleidoscopic exploration of boundaries—natural and man-made, real and imaginary—will forever change your bearings on the map.

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.

Zack Klein's collection of photographs of cabins, shelters, and hideaways in wild places around the world. No text to speak of — just image after image of small structures in big landscapes. The architectural equivalent of a deep breath.

Andrew Pham bicycled across Vietnam twenty years after his family fled the country. The journey is external — heat, roads, food — and internal — identity, memory, belonging. A Vietnamese American returning to a place that's both home and foreign.

Peter Hessler drove across China in a rented car, following the Great Wall, watching a village industrialize, and navigating a country reinventing itself at highway speed. The third book in his China trilogy, and the one most about landscape and what happens to it when money arrives.

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.

Jeremy Collins's illustrated exploration of climbing — each route rendered as art, each summit as a drawing. Collins is a climber who draws and a drawer who climbs, and this book is the rare place where both practices converge.

Huw Lewis-Jones's collection of field sketches by explorers, naturalists, and adventurers. Darwin's finches, Shackleton's ice, botanical illustrations from the Amazon. The drawings people made before cameras, when seeing meant drawing.

Wild foods such as venison, foraged berries and greens, and gathered seafood made up nearly half of the American diet just two hundred years ago—to eat was to be wholly connected with seasons and place. Since then, they’ve become a luxury or even black market item, and today most of the developed world will never have the opportunity to eat anything truly uncultivated. Geographer and environmental anthropologist Gina Rae La Cerva asks, “So many edible species and varietals have disappeared to standardization, uniformity, and predictable tastes. What pleasures are we missing?” In her global search for answers, she tries flash-frozen wood ants in Copenhagen (tastes like sour sprinkles), examines the relationship between hunting and conservation in the Congo, and ponders the future of lobsters on the Maine coast. Sensuous and ceaselessly curious, Feasting Wild is the next best thing to breaking bread around a campfire with John Muir and M.F.K. Fisher.

Barry Lopez's collection of short fictions — each one a precise, mysterious vignette about landscape and the human figures who pass through it. Not nature writing. Not fiction exactly. Something in between that only Lopez could have made.

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.

Anna Brones on the Swedish tradition of slowing down for coffee, pastry, and conversation. Part recipe book, part cultural meditation. A gentle argument for stopping.

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.

Saint-Exupéry flew reconnaissance missions over France during the German invasion of 1940. This is his account — lyrical, philosophical, and haunted by the certainty of defeat. The author of The Little Prince at war, seeing the landscape from above as it burns.

Ian Frazier drove back and forth across the Great Plains for years, collecting stories, histories, and observations about the most overlooked landscape in America. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, missile silos, and abandoned towns — Frazier finds everything. A masterpiece of American nonfiction.

Gestalten's photographic survey of cabins, treehouses, and hideaways around the world. Architecture as escape — each structure a small argument for simplicity and solitude.

More from Gestalten's shelter obsession — tiny hotels, micro-cabins, and weekend retreats designed to disappear into the landscape. The photographs do the talking.

Gestalten's guide to van life — the rigs, the routes, the people who traded addresses for odometers. Photography-driven, aspirational, and honest enough to include the parking lots.

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.

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.

Wade Davis's monumental history of the British Everest expeditions of the 1920s — and the World War I trauma that drove them. The climbers who went to Everest were survivors of the trenches. The mountain was where they went to feel something other than horror. The definitive book on early Everest.

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.

Andy Cave grew up in a Yorkshire mining community and became one of Britain's best Himalayan climbers. His memoir spans both worlds — the claustrophobia of the coal face and the exposure of the north face. A working-class life in climbing.

Yvon Chouinard's business memoir and environmental manifesto. How a blacksmith who made climbing gear in his garage built Patagonia into a billion-dollar company without abandoning his principles. The most influential outdoor business book ever written.

Wade Davis on the indigenous cultures disappearing around the world — from the high Arctic to the Amazon to the mountains of Tibet. Davis argues that the loss of cultural diversity is as catastrophic as the loss of biodiversity. Passionate, erudite, and urgent.

Le Anne Schreiber's memoir of leaving New York to live alone in rural upstate. A quiet book about solitude, observation, and what happens when you stop moving. The landscape is the Catskills; the subject is attention.

Daniel Duane's memoir of a year spent climbing in Yosemite and exploring the West after college. Young, restless, and hungry for rock. Duane writes about climbing the way he writes about surfing — with literary self-awareness and genuine love for the sport.

Anna Brones on the Swedish concept of lagom — not too much, not too little, just right. A lifestyle book with more substance than most, rooted in a genuine cultural tradition.

Anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and award-winning author of twenty books, including One River, The Wayfinders, and Into the Silence, Wade Davis has a soul of many passions. One of his strongest is for Colombia, the land and people that stole his heart as a teenager in 1968, before cocaine and civil war transformed one of the earth’s most ecologically and geographically diverse regions into a nightmare of bloody terror. After decades of strife, the country now is healing, creating national parks, restoring Indigenous rights, and opening to travel. Charting the wonders of this renewal, Davis turned to Colombia’s lifeline, the thousand-mile long Magdalena River. With four maps and vivid photography, his new book journeys to snowcapped peaks, the Amazon rainforest, impossibly green wetlands, and coastal sands—where “magical realism is simply journalism.” Best shelved between Gabriel García Márquez and Norman Maclean, Magdalena is a magnetic chronicle of the sacredness of water as the source of all things.

Kelly Brenner's guide to the natural world hiding in urban environments — the ecology of cities, from sidewalk mosses to peregrine falcons nesting on skyscrapers.

Saint-Exupéry's novel about early airmail pilots flying over South America at night — when navigation meant reading the stars and the mountains were invisible until they killed you. Spare, tense, and luminous.

Gestalten's van life compendium — the rigs, the roads, the aesthetic of living out of a vehicle. Coffee-table format, wanderlust content.

Bill McKibben's memoir of a year spent fighting the Keystone XL pipeline and learning to keep bees in Vermont. The activist and the beekeeper as parallel lives — one loud, one quiet, both essential.

Rick Bass's early memoir of working as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi — before Montana, before the Yaak, before he became an environmental writer. The irony of a future conservationist hunting for oil is never stated but always present.

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.

Kerouac's novel of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty crossing and recrossing America is the foundational text of the Beat Generation. The road is the point — not the destination, not the arrival, just the movement itself.

Peter Hessler's second China book — built around the discovery of ancient oracle bones inscribed with the earliest Chinese writing, but really about modern China's relationship with its own past. Hessler weaves together archaeology, journalism, and the lives of ordinary people navigating extraordinary change.

James and Deborah Fallows flew a single-engine plane around America for five years, landing in small towns and reporting on what they found. The opposite of decline narrative — a book about the places where things are working, told without sentimentality.

The scientific investigation behind The Serpent and the Rainbow — the ethnobotany of Haitian zombie powder, Vodou pharmacology, and the boundary between death and not-death. Academic but riveting.

Gestalten's collection of extraordinary lodgings in extraordinary places — treehouses, ice hotels, desert camps, and cliff dwellings. Aspiration as architecture.

As a NOLS instructor in Chile's Aysén Region in 1993, Nancy Pfeiffer watched a man on a horse gracefully navigate a swollen river. Standing with her college students, hungry and wet and not at all at ease, she vowed to return on horseback—to try to experience the land like a local. At the age of 38, she saddled up for lessons at home in Palmer, Alaska, where she worked as a mountain guide, and few years later she was back in Coyhaique, looking to buy a horse and head south. Riding Into the Heart of Patagonia is a memoir of growth—of a self-reliant adventurer learning patience and ceding the urge to control—and also of a changing countryside, with dams proposed and roads being paved. Pfeiffer's observations beckon: flowering calafate, gnarled branches in the lenga forest, the deeply rooted, welcoming people. It all smells of horsehair and rivers and mud and maté, and I didn’t want any of it to end.

The history of the Animas River watershed in southwestern Colorado — from Ancestral Puebloans to the Gold King Mine spill. A river poisoned by mining and a community reckoning with the consequences.

Two years teaching English in a small city on the Yangtze during China's transformation. The river rises, the city changes, and the outsider watches with the precision of someone who knows he's seeing something that won't last.

Gestalten's survey of floating architecture — houseboats, sailing vessels, and structures built on or over water. The aesthetic of life afloat.

More Gestalten shelter photography — cabins, sheds, and retreats designed to minimize the boundary between inside and outside.

The investigation into what really happened to Michael Rockefeller when he disappeared off the coast of New Guinea in 1961. The answer involves headhunting, revenge, and a colonial legacy darker than the official story allowed.

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.

Chouinard on risk — in climbing, in business, in life. Short essays drawn from decades of doing things the hard way. The philosophy behind Patagonia, distilled to its essentials.

The first novel — airmail pilots over the Sahara and the Spanish coast, written from the cockpit. Romantic, dangerous, and suffused with the light of North Africa. The apprentice work that led to Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars.

Stay and Fight is land-loving, community-rooted fiction in the tradition of Wendell Berry, though with a little more guerrilla resistance and a lot more sex. Following her boyfriend’s notions of self-reliance, Seattle-raised Helen Conley buys twenty steep, densely wooded acres in Appalachia, but the boyfriend soon abandons her. To everyone’s surprise, Helen stays, inviting a local family, Karen and Lily and their baby boy, to move in and join forces. The resourceful local women butt heads with college-educated Helen and her Foxfire-like “Best Practices Binder”—“look for morels in the creek bed, oyster mushrooms smell like anise”—but together they build a ramshackle off-grid refuge. Years of hard labor, roadkill dinners, and isolation go by, but the outside world eventually comes knocking, then suddenly snarling. How far would you go to protect all that you hold dear? This is one fine rabble-rouser of a tale, as determined as the bite of a snapping turtle.

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

The global history of surfing — how it traveled from Polynesia to every coastline on earth, and what happened when it arrived. Surfing in Gaza, surfing in Iceland, surfing in war zones. The unexpected results are the best parts.

In 2013, Mills embeds with Expedition Denali, a group of Black mountaineers aiming to plant their crampons on the summit of the team’s namesake peak. Peppering their story with those of other Black adventurers, he makes the case that beyond those glacier-strewn Alaskan slopes, there’s a much bigger mountain to climb—one that hopefully bridges a racial gap in both outdoor participation and representation to create a more equitable and just outdoors for all.

An anthology of nature writing by people of color — voices that have been present in the landscape all along but absent from the genre. Essential correction to a tradition that has been overwhelmingly white.

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.

Recipes organized around cycling life — food for before, during, and after rides. Brones brings the same Scandinavian-inflected simplicity she brings to everything.

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.

Working with green wood in the forest — from felling to finished object, using hand tools and traditional techniques. A manual for making things the slow way.

A cookbook for people who cook outside — campfires, portable stoves, Dutch ovens. 120 recipes organized by meal and method, designed for actual wilderness conditions.

More Gestalten shelter architecture — remote cabins, off-grid hideaways, and the buildings people construct when they want to disappear.

Raised in rural South Carolina on his grandmother’s farm, Lanham found kinship with the natural world, building new roots on the same lands upon which his ancestors were once enslaved. His memoir unspools across a series of poetic, yet unflinching essays about home, land, relationships, race, and, of course, birds that dispel the notion that it’s only the bold-named white naturalists of yore who deserve a spot in the classic nature-writing canon.

Bass's short stories about geology, landscape, and the people shaped by the land they live on. The rocks are literal — Montana's geology — and metaphorical. The writing is dense and luminous.

Short essays about driving, camping, and the American landscape — the kind of book you read in a van with the windows down. Unpretentious and warm.

Gestalten on mobile architecture — vans, tiny houses, modular shelters, and the people who chose impermanence as a lifestyle.

Walking the ancient paths of Britain, Palestine, Spain, and the Himalaya. Each path is a palimpsest — layers of footsteps, centuries deep. Macfarlane at his most lyrical, following routes that were old before roads existed.

The business philosophy behind Patagonia — environmental responsibility as a corporate practice, not a marketing strategy. A companion to Let My People Go Surfing, more focused on the supply chain.

A father-son cycling trip through Italy to find the village their ancestors left. The riding is the vehicle; the family history is the destination.

The popular account of the Haitian zombie investigation — Vodou, pharmacology, and a Harvard ethnobotanist in over his head. The book that made Wade Davis famous, and the one he's been trying to live down since.

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.

Bass drives across America cooking meals for the writers he admires — McGuane, Kittredge, Joyce Carol Oates. Each visit is a pilgrimage. The food is the excuse; the conversation is the point.

Adventurers obsess over self-reliance and paring down, taking only what’s absolutely needed. Simplicity begets style, we like to say. Unless you’re living in a utopian commune, that is—then we roll our eyes at such wooly-headed minimalism. But what really happens when we strip away everything but the necessities? So asks Mark Sundeen in The Unsettlers, an observant investigation into the lives of three American families pursuing “radical simplicity,” where making dinner and even personal entertainment become adventurous. Can streamlined lives remain relevant? And hasn’t every other generation asked this question? There aren’t many answers here, only inquiries, which sounds heavy, but Sundeen and the people he profiles are bracingly smart, fun, and non-preachy. The Unsettlers asks us not to change our ways, but to pause and study the trail we’re on—good habits for any explorer.

Macfarlane sleeping rough in the last wild places of Britain and Ireland — cliff ledges, mountain summits, hollow trees, and salt marshes. The discovery that wildness persists even in the most settled landscape on earth.

Maps from fiction, fantasy, and imagination — Tolkien's Middle-earth, Stevenson's Treasure Island, and dozens of others. Lewis-Jones curates the cartography of places that exist only in books.

A geologist's reckoning with the American landscape through the lens of race — how the land was taken, who was erased, and what the rocks remember. Savoy brings scientific training and personal history to terrain that most nature writing ignores.

Brooklyn to the tip of South America by motorcycle — the Pan-American Highway and everything off it. Photography-driven, with the road itself as the organizing principle.

Macfarlane goes underground — into caves, catacombs, ice cores, nuclear waste sites, and the fungal networks beneath forests. The world beneath our feet, rendered with the same literary attention he brings to the surface.

If you thought the last wisp of van life soul had long since sputtered out, this new hardcover could convince you otherwise. As the guy behind the #vanlife hashtag, Foster Huntington knows all about four-wheeled labor-of-loves, and this overstuffed book showcases hundreds of crowd-sourced photographs he’s collected over the years. It features thoughtful interviews with van dwellers—how much they spent; the realities of gas mileage and engine maintenance; where they make space for surfboards, dogs, bookshelves, guitars, and dirt bikes. And from Australia to France to Michigan, there are shots of custom campers, Vanagons, Sprinters, and school buses, each with their own hard-earned style and affectionately named: Gigi, Chewy, Greta, Hayduke, Walter, The Bunkhouse Road-Tripper. You’ll spend less time worrying if adventure has lost its purity and more getting stoked by this ode to the art of a well-stocked vehicle and its promise of open horizons.

A tiny outpost in the Norwegian Arctic and a dogsled camp fixed on a remote slab of Alaskan ice serve as frigid twin sirens for Braverman, who spends several years cycling through both places in an effort to harden her exterior and untangle her insides with equal measures of cold, isolation, and manual labor. In the process, she discovers a valuable truth—that sometimes it’s the suffering you choose that helps you work through the trauma you didn’t.

Markham grew up in Kenya, trained racehorses, and became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. Hemingway said she could write rings around all of them. He was right.

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

A chef's love letter to the landscape and food of Newfoundland — wild game, foraged plants, and the connection between cooking and the land the ingredients come from.

Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wasn’t just the writer of The Little Prince, he was a pilot who helped pioneer postal aviation in the 1920s, when planes barely had instruments (he lamented that pilots of later, more-advanced planes were little more than accountants). Wind, Sand is his masterpiece of memoir and ode to the romance of flying in its earliest days. Saint-Exupéry crashed many times, including in the Sahara (a gripping account), but the book flies highest when he rhapsodizes about the joys of the sky. “The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth,” he wrote, and in this case it has unveiled the true face of the man.

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.

Essays on nature writing as a practice — the craft, the tradition, and the writers who defined it. A companion for anyone trying to put landscape into words.