"Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent's past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her--paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land--lie...

Fierce, timely, and unsettling essays from an important and beloved writer and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams is one of our most impassioned defenders of public lands. A naturalist, fervent activist, and stirring writer, she has spoken to us and for us in books like The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of Americas National Parks and Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. In these new essays, Williams explores the concept of erosion:...

"Drew Lanham explores his obsession with birds and all things wild in a mixture of poetry and prose. He questions vital assumptions taken for granted by so many birdwatchers: can birding be an escape if the birder is not in a safe place? Who is watching him as he watches birds? With a refreshing balance of reverence and candor, Lanham paints a unique portrait of the natural world: listening to cicadas, tracking sandpipers, towhees, wrens, and cataloging...

A profile of the Lost Generation captures life among the expatriates on Paris' Left Bank during the 1920s, the brutality of bullfighting in Spain, and the moral and spiritual dissolution of a generation.

The tragic death of their best friend has a profound influence on the passionate relationship between Toro, a serious young college student in Tokyo, and Naoko, an introspective beauty.

Presents nine stories by the award-winning author of Independence Day includes the novella, “The Run of Yourself,” in which a New Orleans lawyer tackles the challenges of living beyond his Irish wife’s death. Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to solace the narrator’s sorrow after his father’s death. “Driving Up” follows an...

"It is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson--a sensible schoolmarm and lonely spinster--is just trying to get through life. But one day, she reaches her breaking point, abandoning her job and her tidy, circumscribed life, to set out on an expedition to the other side of the world in search of an insect that may or may not exist: the golden beetle of New Caledonia, Margery's childhood obsession ever since her father gave...

**PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST** **NOMINATED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE** **WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD** A New York Times Notable Book A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of the Year An NPR Great Read of 2014 A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of the Year. In these pages, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America: Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico. The slave of a Spanish conquistador, Estebanico sails for the Americas...