In The Small Heart of Things, Julian Hoffman intimately examines the myriad ways in which connections to the natural world can be deepened through an equality of perception, whether it’s a caterpillar carrying its house of leaves, transhumant shepherds ranging high mountain pastures, a quail taking cover on an empty steppe, or a Turkmen family emigrating from Afghanistan to Istanbul. The narrative spans the common—and often contested—ground that supports human and natural communit...

The 93rd Short Story Collection is here for your enjoyment! Here our readers visit old favorites: Lord Dunsany, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ambrose Bierce writing as Dod Grile. We also bring you by new authors: William M. Conselman, Myrtle Levy Gaylord and Helen Woljeska as well as the only short story ever written by a 1922 magazine competition winner, Helen H. Dudley.

This timely study is the first to examine the relationship between competition for energy resources and the propensity for conflict in the Caspian region. Taking the discussion well beyond issues of pipeline politics and the significance of Caspian oil and gas to the global market, the book offers significant new findings concerning the impact of energy wealth on the political life and economies of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. The contributors, a leading group of scholars and ...

T he New York Times–bestselling author of H is for Hawk explores the human relationship to the natural world in this "dazzling" essay collection ( Wall Street Journal).In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asle...

**A SUNDAY TIMES BEST NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYA beautiful, lyrical exploration of the places where nature is flourishing in our absence"[Flyn] captures the dread, sadness, and wonder of beholding the results of humanity's destructive impulse, and she arrives at a new appreciation of life, 'all the stranger and more valuable for its resilence.'" —The New Yorker**Some of the only truly feral cattle in the world wander a long-abandoned isla...

The acclaimed author's memoir of life with an African grey parrot offers "a thoughtful and generous celebration of minds and bodies different from our own" ( Times Literary Supplement, UK).For thirty years, Brian Brett shared his office and his life with Tuco, a remarkable parrot given to asking questions such as "Whaddya know?" and announcing "Party time!" when guests showed up at Brett's farm. Although Brett bought Tuco on a whim, he gradually realized t...

"Rich detail and vivid anecdotes of adventure....A treasure trove of exotic fact and hard thinking."—The New York Times Book Review, front pageFor millennia, lions, tigers, and their man-eating kin have kept our dark, scary forests dark and scary, and their predatory majesty has been the stuff of folklore. But by the year 2150 big predators may only exist on the other side of glass barriers and chain-link fences. Their gradual disappearance is changing the very nature of o...

In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy uses turquoise—the color and the gem—to probe deeper into our profound human attachment to landscape.From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great beauty and great desecration. Her keen vision makes us look anew at ancestral mountains,...

In Outlandish, acclaimed travel writer Nick Hunt takes us across landscapes that shouldnot be there, wildernesses found in Europe yet seemingly belonging to far-off continents:a patch of Arctic tundra in Scotland; the continent's largest surviving remnant of primevalforest in Poland and Belarus; Europe's only true desert in Spain; and the fathomlessgrassland steppes of Hungary.From snow-capped mountain range to dense green forest, desert ravines to thread...

A journalist embarks on the adventure of a lifetime—living in a remote cabin in Siberia—in this Thoreau-esque meditation on escaping the chaos of modern life and rediscovering the luxury of solitude.“…wry, exuberant, and a perfect balm for anyone who dreams of running away to the middle of nowhere.”—San Francisco ChronicleNo stranger to inhospitable places, journalist Sylvain Tesson exiles himself to a wooden cabin on Siberi...

This acclaimed twenty-first–century Russian novel is "a Dantean descent" into the abandoned Soviet gulags, written "with a clear poetic sensibility" ( The Wall Street Journal).In Sergei Lebedev's debut novel, an unnamed young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a mysterious neighbor who once saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of f...