16 books
Sanmao
Sanmao was a Taiwanese writer who read one article about the Sahara and moved there, marrying a Spanish diver named José and settling in El Aaiún in the Spanish Sahara in the 1970s. These are her dispatches: Building furniture out…
Christina Thompson
How did people reach every habitable island across ten million square miles of Pacific, upwind, centuries before Europeans could cross an ocean at all? Thompson takes the whole history of that question: Cook and his crews puzzling over it, missionaries,…
Tyson Yunkaporta
Yunkaporta is an Apalech man from far north Queensland and an academic, and the book asks what Indigenous thinking has to say about global systems — not as culture but as method. Each chapter starts with a symbol he carves…
D.W. Pasulka
Pasulka teaches religious studies in North Carolina and wrote her first book on purgatory. Digging through old Catholic accounts, she kept hitting things that sounded oddly familiar: orbs of light, luminous beings, spinning suns, discs in the sky. So she…
Oliver Morton
Morton is a science writer and this is the moon from every angle at once. How it formed and why that mattered for life here. What Apollo actually was as a political project and what it felt like. The geology…
Lucinda Kaukas Havenhand
A history of the American interior between roughly 1940 and 1970, and the useful thing is that it’s about interiors rather than the famous chairs. Havenhand covers the designers who actually shaped how rooms looked and worked — Florence Knoll,…
Stephanie Bower
Bower trained as an architect and taught architectural drawing, and this is the tips volume — a hundred and one short entries you can flip to standing on a corner. Materials, then the ones people actually need: How to find…
Shari Blaukopf
Blaukopf teaches in Montreal and sketches a lot of wet streets and bare trees, and this is the color volume of the handbook series. It’s pocket-sized and built around one idea: A tiny palette, mixed well, beats a big box…
Anil Ananthaswamy
Recommended by a friend of a friend who’s a working physicist. One experiment, two hundred years. Shine light through two slits and it makes an interference pattern, like waves. Fire it one particle at a time and the pattern still…
Naomi Alderman
Teenage girls start producing an electrical charge from a strand of muscle across the collarbone, enough to hurt, enough to kill. They can wake it in older women. Inside a decade the whole arrangement of the world has flipped. Alderman…
