Reading Lists
Now a Major Motion Picture from Focus Features, Starring Kevin Costner and Diane Lane
It’s September 1951, in Dalton, North Dakota: years since George and Margaret’s widowed daughter-in-law left with their only grandson...
An Esquire “Best Book of Spring 2022”
A Publishers Weekly “Best Book of Summer 2022”
A Kirkus “Best Book of May 2022”
A San Francisco Chronicle “Most Anticipated Novel of 2022”
A...
Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul Indian Horse is surrounded by violence and cruelty. At the urging of a priest, he finds a tentative salvation in hockey. Yet as Saul’s victories mount, so do the racism and the...
Tormented by the loss of his wife, department store window-dresser Colton Kemp decides to raise his newborn twins in secrecy and isolation, to become human mannequins. “A book that makes grand promises and delivers” (New York Times), ...
This novel takes readers from nineteenth-century Prince Edward Island to modern-day Iraq, from the battlefields of the First World War to the deserts of Mexico and Texas. Throughout, relationships are forged and broken, wars are fought, and...
When a car explodes in Kabul ten years after 9/11, a journalist discovers that its passengers—three fellow ex-pats—had formed an unlikely love triangle. As the journalist learns more, the narratives of their lives become inseparable from the...
Born and raised in the Arctic, Cutuk Hawcley has learned to provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading. But when he leaves for the city as a young man, incompatible realities collide, forcing Cutuk to choose between two worlds—both...
In this modern classic, the charges of a young Sioux woman force David Hayden’s father, the sheriff of their small town, to confront his older brother, a charming war hero and respected doctor. This novel is an astonishing tale of love and...
An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022
An Indie Next Selection for April 2022
A Junior Library Guild Selection for Spring 2022
Both a celebration of the natural world and a memoir of one...
Facing environmental destruction and broken promises from the Canadian government, the Pimicikamak community at Cross Lake have evicted Manitoba’s electric utility from the local dam. The author, who grew up in the nearby town of Jenpeg, returns...
An Electric Literature Favorite Nonfiction Book of 2021
A TIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Los Angeles Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Literary Hub Most...
Growing up on his family’s land in South Carolina, the author fell in love with the subtle beauties of the natural world around him—and grew up to be one of the lone black men in a predominantly white field. This memoir is a riveting exploration...
As a small boy in remote Alberta, the author was immersed in his Cree family’s history, passed down in the stories of his mother, Bertha. But after a series of tragic losses, Bertha turned wild and unstable, and their home life became chaotic....
From sixteen-year-old Dara McAnulty, a globally renowned figure in the youth climate activist movement, comes a memoir about loving the natural world and fighting to save it.
Winner of the Wainwright Prize for UK nature...
When Gregory Orr was twelve years old, he shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident. Guilt weighed on him throughout a childhood split between the rural Hudson Valley and jungles of Haiti. But eventually his experiences led him to...
This contemporary classic has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and to fight for the places they love. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, this memoir catalogues a people and their home—a...
When her mother is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, the author—a cook, collector of thrifted vintage cast iron, and fiercely devoted daughter, sister, and aunt—can’t help but wonder: Feed a fever, starve a cold, but what do we do for...
When a New Jersey native moves to Minnesota, she discovers a local food movement strong enough to survive the toughest winter. Fascinating and heartfelt, this memoir demonstrates that even in a place with a short growing season, food grown...
When young Deni’s mother leaves his charismatic father, the boy learns of his father’s true identity: André Béchard was once a bank robber—and so Deni’s imagination is set on fire. This deeply affecting memoir is at once a highly unconventional...
Jon Lurie and José Perez are floundering. Jon is newly divorced and depressed; José, a smart, angry young Lakota-Puerto Rican, is embedded in a haze of women and street feuds. Then Lurie hits upon a plan to save them: to retrace the mythic two...
For over thirty years, the author has written novels in which the natural world is as much a living presence as any character. In this beautiful, evocative, and sometimes provocative memoir, he explores Australia’s unique landscape, and how that...
From the celebrated author of feeld comes a formally commanding third collection, dexterously recounting the survival of a period suffused with mourning.
As a small boy in remote Alberta, the author was immersed in his Cree family’s history, passed down in the stories of his mother, Bertha. But after a series of tragic losses, Bertha turned wild and unstable, and their home life became chaotic....
Selected by Kazim Ali as a winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series, Thrown in the Throat is a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times. Thrown in the Throat is a...
This National Poetry Series winner is an unflinching portrait of the actual west—full of beauty as well as brutality, where boys tentatively learn to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged but also startlingly lush, and even its...
A Lambda Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Book of March 2022
What is illusion—a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem—the truth, or “a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself”?
...
Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between.
Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse—elegant, vicious, “a one-girl armageddon” draped in crushed velvet—teaches us that fragility...
In March 2011, a tsunami caused by an earthquake collided with nearby power plant Fukushima Daiichi, causing the only nuclear disaster in history to rival Chernobyl in scope. These poems take a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart...
As a botanist, the author has been trained to examine nature with the tools of science; as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our teachers. Here she brings these two lenses together,...
Ojibwe tradition calls for fathers to walk their children through the world, sharing the ancient understanding “that we are all, animate and inanimate alike, living on the one pure breath with which the Creator gave life to the Universe.” In this...
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics. “Let’s create folklore side-by-side,” he urges, asking us to aspire to a...
An Electric Literature Favorite Nonfiction Book of 2021
A TIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Los Angeles Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Literary Hub Most...
A New York Times Best Seller
Barnes & Noble 2020 Book of the Year
From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction—a collection of essays about the natural world,...
From Arra Lynn Ross, a tender, generous, and generative extended poem centered on the experience of parenthood.
“What is learned? I’ll return for my son; / at school, at three thirty-eight, bells will ring & run /...
Now a Major Motion Picture from Focus Features, Starring Kevin Costner and Diane Lane
It’s September 1951, in Dalton, North Dakota: years since George and Margaret’s widowed daughter-in-law left with their only grandson...
Finalist for the Midwest Book Award
From James P. Lenfestey, a collection of poems that lends delicacy and gentle humor to durable, long-lasting love.
Writing love poems fifty years into a marriage is no easy task...
Widowed, penniless, responsible for her beloved baby boy, and subject to the small-town gossip of Harvester, Minnesota—Nell Stillman’s lot is not an easy one. Yet she finds strength in lasting friendships and in the rich inner life awakened by...
Growing up in Alabama, the author was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she offers an unusual, captivating portrait of her family and her childhood—and of the...
An Electric Literature Favorite Nonfiction Book of 2021
A TIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Los Angeles Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Literary Hub Most...
An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022
An Indie Next Selection for April 2022
A Junior Library Guild Selection for Spring 2022
Both a celebration of the natural world and a memoir of one...
In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Max Ritvo was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet in remission from pediatric cancer. Studded with poems and songs, their...
When her mother is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, the author—a cook, collector of thrifted vintage cast iron, and fiercely devoted daughter, sister, and aunt—can’t help but wonder: Feed a fever, starve a cold, but what do we do for...
From the celebrated author of feeld comes a formally commanding third collection, dexterously recounting the survival of a period suffused with mourning.
Full of bravado and introspection, of twenty-first-century feminist swagger and harrowing loss, this collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact. Taking readers from New York City to rural Kentucky, these poems...
A final collection fully inscribed with the daring of the author’s acrobatic mind and the force of his unrelenting spirit. These poems brush up against the pain, fear, and isolation that accompany a long illness, but with all the creative force...
Uncanny, heartbreaking, and often surreal, this National Poetry Series winner is an unforgettable elegy for the people and places that have been lost to opioids in rural Appalachia. In these poems we see both the lost and the bereaved, the...
A New York Times Best Seller
Barnes & Noble 2020 Book of the Year
From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction—a collection of essays about the natural world,...
As a botanist, the author has been trained to examine nature with the tools of science; as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our teachers. Here she brings these two lenses together,...
From sixteen-year-old Dara McAnulty, a globally renowned figure in the youth climate activist movement, comes a memoir about loving the natural world and fighting to save it.
Winner of the Wainwright Prize for UK nature...
Growing up in Alabama, the author was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she offers an unusual, captivating portrait of her family and her childhood—and of the...
A haunting novel spanning several generations, following a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life and their sacrifices to protect what matters most. Weaving together the voices of four indelible women—including tough, bookish...
An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022
An Indie Next Selection for April 2022
A Junior Library Guild Selection for Spring 2022
Both a celebration of the natural world and a memoir of one...
Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Winner of the 2022 Southern Book Prize
An Indie Next Selection for September 2021
A Book Marks Best Reviewed Essay...
Facing environmental destruction and broken promises from the Canadian government, the Pimicikamak community at Cross Lake have evicted Manitoba’s electric utility from the local dam. The author, who grew up in the nearby town of Jenpeg, returns...
Growing up on his family’s land in South Carolina, the author fell in love with the subtle beauties of the natural world around him—and grew up to be one of the lone black men in a predominantly white field. This memoir is a riveting exploration...
The Boundary Waters is a national treasure—so when the authors learned of a danger facing the region, they decided to speak on behalf of the wilderness. This is the story of their year bearing witness to wild places and a passionate argument for...
From a haunted widow’s wildly expanding mansion to atomic test sites in the Nevada desert, the settings of these essays are often places of destruction and loss. And yet this collection transforms these eerie, apocalyptic destinations into sites...
These essays take jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of their many inspirations. Surveying both the tiniest earth dwellers and the most far-flung celestial bodies, this is a book of wonder, one readers cannot...
In the century and a half since John James Audubon’s death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was—or the dramatic story behind The Birds of America...