13 books
George Saunders
The one that made him a household name. A boy imagining himself heroic in the woods and a dying man walking out onto a frozen pond to spare his family. Prisoners in a facility being dosed with drugs that produce…
Helen Birch
Two hundred-plus drawings by working artists, mostly people Birch found online, each one printed with a short note on how it was done. Ball-point pen on found paper. Crosshatching with a dip pen. Gouache over a photocopy. Colored ink on…
M. Kat Anderson
The California the Spanish and then the Americans walked into looked like untouched abundance, and Anderson’s book shows it was a garden. Indigenous Californians burned meadows on schedule, coppiced hazel and redbud so the shoots would come back straight enough…
Donna Tartt
Theo Decker is thirteen when a bomb goes off in the Metropolitan Museum, killing his mother, and in the smoke a dying old man tells him to take a small Dutch painting off the wall. He does, and he keeps…
Nathaniel Rich
Mitchell Zukor is a young math genius hired by a Manhattan firm called FutureWorld that sells corporations worst-case scenarios — for a fee, they calculate your catastrophic exposure and indemnify you against being sued for not foreseeing it. Mitchell is…
Jason Matthews
Dominika Egorova is a ballerina whose career ends with an injury, and her uncle in Russian intelligence gets her into Sparrow School, where the state trains officers in seduction as tradecraft. Her assignment is a young CIA officer in Helsinki…
Tana French
Tana French’s fourth Dublin Murder Squad book, and the bleakest. Mick Kennedy, called Scorcher, is the squad’s top closer, a by-the-book man who believes hard work and rules keep the dark out. He catches a case at Brianstown, a half-finished…
Velma Wallis
During a harsh winter, a nomadic tribe makes the difficult decision to leave two elderly women behind. At first the women are devastated, but they come to realize they don’t have to give up on life without a fight. To…
Gestalten
The one that started the small-cabin publishing run. Huts, shelters, and retreats from the last couple of decades, plus a handful of older icons, arranged for browsing — forest cabins on stilts, mountain refuges, a sauna at the end of…
Yvon Chouinard
The 1968 journey to Patagonia by Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins is the stuff of legend, and from it epic tales and giant companies were sparked. Four decades later, Jeff Johnson retraced their travels for Chris Malloy’s 2010 film, 180°…
