12 books
John Jeremiah Sullivan
Fourteen pieces and hardly a dud. Sullivan at a Christian rock festival in an RV with a group of West Virginia teenagers, at Disney World with the Real World cast, in the Ozarks with Axl Rose’s hometown. Also: The cave…
David Rains Wallace
Here’s the riddle: Nobody can say how old the California desert actually is, or where its plants and animals came from. Creosote, ocotillo, cactus, the chuckwalla itself — did they evolve out there over tens of millions of years, or…
Leslie Kean
The 2010 book that changed the conversation, subtitled “generals, pilots, and government officials go on the record,” and that’s literally the structure. Kean got firsthand accounts from people with names and ranks: A Belgian air force general, an Iranian fighter…
Philip L. Fradkin
In November 1934 a twenty-year-old kid from Los Angeles rode two burros into Davis Gulch on the Escalante and never came out. The burros were found penned in the canyon. He wasn’t. He’d been wandering the Southwest since he was…
Michael R. Canfield
A dozen field scientists open their notebooks and let you look. George Schaller’s pages from the Serengeti lions and the pandas in Sichuan. Bernd Heinrich on ravens in the Maine woods. Kenn Kaufman’s lists from the year he hitchhiked the…
Ueda Akinari
First published in 1776, the nine gothic tales in this collection are Japan’s finest and most celebrated examples of the literature of the occult. They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the…
David Abram
David Abram put himself through school doing card tricks, which is how he ended up hanging around traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal. He figured they’d talk shop about magic. Instead he found their real work wasn’t with people at…
Haruki Murakami
You know Murakami’s going to be weird, you just don’t know if you’re going to like the flavor of weird. I loved 1Q84. What’s more romantic than one moon hanging in the sky? Two moons! The book—and it’s a long…
Stuart M. Kaminsky
Toby Peters is a broke Los Angeles private detective in the 1940s whose specialty is doing quiet jobs for movie stars. In this one the client is Cary Grant, being blackmailed with a photograph and tangled up in wartime counterintelligence…
