Our Books

Originally published in 1993, this pioneering anthology is a powerful polemic for fundamental cultural change: the transformation of basic attitudes about power, gender, race, and sexuality. This edition updates statistics and essays, and adds new…

These poems capture the way events reverberate and repeat across time and place: between the seventeenth-century tulip trade and the twentieth-century AIDS epidemic, for example; or even between a housekeeper, a Vermeer painting, and that day’s…

Thirteen-year-old Anna Kallio often thinks about the way life was before her mother died. When Anna and her brother realize how lonely their father is, they plot to find him a new wife, even trying to arrange a match with one of the “mail order”…

Born into a Mennonite community on the Russian steppes, Katya Vogt lives with her family on the large and wealthy Sudermann estate. Their religion, their traditions, and the luxurious green of their fields set them apart from the surrounding Russian…

In these short pieces—sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking—the author chronicles her return to a hometown in need of repair, physical and otherwise, after seventeen years away. Syrup boils, alligator trapping, and fighting to save the town…

It’s 1935, and the hard times of the Great Depression, it seems, are here to stay. One day, MaryJake’s whole family packs up in the car and leaves—and after a couple hours’ drive, MaryJake finds herself alone on the edge of the road. So begins the…

This collection reflects on the author’s time in Iceland (his ancestral home), his ongoing love affair with music, a friend’s death from AIDS, and his bold reactions to the world around him. Moving from Oregon forests to the deserts around Tuscon…

Meditating on the successful marriage of science and poetry, these essays cover true stories about color-blind scientists, the knowledge stored in ancient Native American songs, the link between an Amy Clampitt poem and diabetes research, and a…

Commuters, suburbanites, city dwellers: Are you curious about making your life more livable and interested in knowing what that might mean? This anthology introduces a range of perspectives about creating successful, livable cities, with examples…

This book gathers the evidence of a lifetime’s commitment to nonviolence. Born the year World War I began, the author spent World War II in a camp for conscientious objectors. His writings show that it is possible—and crucial—to think independently…

Organized by the seasons of the year, beginning with fall, these poems find wildness near at hand—and, through its recording, deepen consciousness of the physical processes of the earth and our own lives. Along the way, the collection provides…

Henry Bunks escapes neighborhood bullies and a grim, overcrowded apartment building by spending hours exploring the canal near his Miami home. Then a split-second decision to stow away aboard the boat of an outlaw alligator hunter begins Henry’s…

Written the year the author’s mother died and her first grandchild was born, these are poems that delve deeply into the ordinary passages and transformations of life, seeking out the possibility of a “Good Heart.”

These stories evoke a world in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy. The characters grapple with potent forces of family, history, and belief—forces that at times dare…

Under Frederick the Great, every Jew who married was required to buy otherwise unsalable china from the royal porcelain factory. Moses Mendelssohn, a world-famous philosopher in the eighteenth century, was forced to buy twenty life-size porcelain…

The summer of 1964 begins calmly enough. But when civil rights workers come to a small Mississippi town and the Ku Klux Klan responds with intimidation and terrorism, the sultry days and nights are transformed into Freedom Summer. Soon three friends…

A disarmingly honest story of the author’s restless, rootless, disaffected youth, looking for meaning in drugs and an active outdoor life in the West. From time spent fishing, climbing, and making a living logging—as well as through friendships with…

In these essays, the author describes how he found a way to balance his passions for literature and for the outdoors by building a sugarhouse with his sons in the Vermont woods. For him, the “frog run”—the tail end of the sugaring season in New…

Andy Fleck doesn’t have much of a family. A kid with Attention Deficit Disorder, he can’t keep himself from challenging every limit that is set by his adoptive parents Jeff and Laurie. It’s easy to see that Andy is a good kid dealing with his own…

In January 2001, the editors, responding to proposals to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, sent a call to writers across the country. With testimonies by President Jimmy Carter, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Bill McKibben, and Terry Tempest…

Reared on her father’s thirty thousand-acre ranch, the author grew up to become a rancher herself, raising sport horses. In these essays—which rise and fall with the undulations of the prairie, and which can pack a punch like South Dakota weather—she…

The author was happily sailing through life, raised among naturalists and nurtured by a family history as American as the Stars and Stripes. But then a short trip to Guatemala changed his life, setting him on a very different path toward radical…

In this book, the author describes locales that are dear to her because they are still shaped by nature: Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy; Provincetown, Massachusetts; Tucson, Arizona; and Poamoho, Hawaii. The farther we remove ourselves from…

These poems explore the territory of longing and loss, love and family, wild land and city street. With nods to Johannes Brahms and Joseph Haydn, Pablo Neruda, Theodore Roethke, and Christopher Smart, this collection tells of a passion for being in…

Written in the third century, this is one of the earliest Chinese works about the use of language, intended for those who wish to engage the art of letters at its deepest levels. In sixteen sections, it discusses the joys and problems that face both…

This book is the first of its kind, providing a thoughtful, practical process for neighborhood planning for concerned citizens as well as professional planners.

Part traveler’s journal, part philosophical exploration, this book considers the idea of islands and asks whether they encourage eccentricity and grandeur in human beings. Along the way, it introduces beguiling characters and cultures, from the well…

As a boy in Colorado, the author fell in love with alpine heights and the butterflies that float above the tree line. This early passion sparked a career in conservation that took him across the globe—until he realized that he was no longer as…

Arranged by letter of the alphabet, with at least one entry per letter, these short pieces capture the variety of daily life in contemporary China. Here, one learns what it is like to travel by “hard-seat” train to a remote village, to smuggle…

Deciding that her life was insufficiently grounded in real-world experience, the author, a Quaker reared as a Catholic, embarked on a year of tending sheep. In this often hilarious book, she describes her time in the barn as well as an extended visit…

Known for beautifully observed and illustrated books about the rivers, deserts, and mountains of the West, the author here focuses on the guiding principles of her life as naturalist. She moves from details to the larger patterns that link them to…

Growing up, the author could define failure easily; it was “to die in Minneota.” But when he returned to his hometown twenty years later, he began to discover more of himself and of our time. This books investigates—through the lens of small-town…

Organized by the seasons of the year, this book explores the natural and soul-sustaining beauty of the largest roadless area east of the Rocky Mountains. Drawing on the works of Thoreau and Wendell Berry, the author turns his naturalist’s eye on this…

Here the author recalls the stories and experiences that have guided him as a writer, and speaks on behalf of a life rooted in the commonplace. Emerging from his work is the conviction that moments of interaction with the nonhuman world restore the…

In this book, the author tells the story of his family’s homestead in the Great Basin, a ranch worked by horses when he was a boy and transformed into an agribusiness by the time he was a grown man. Recounting his life as farmer and writer, he…