It was 1993, Suzanne Roberts had just finished college, and when her friend suggested they hike California’s John Muir Trail, the adventure sounded like the perfect distraction from a difficult home life and thoughts about the future. But she never imagined that the twenty-eight-day hike would change her life. Part memoir, part nature writing, part travelogue, Almost Somewhere is Roberts’s account of that hike.

In Search of Monster Fish is an action-packed, knee-slapping ride into and out of the belly of the beast. Join extreme angler Mark Spitzer as he encounters man-eating catfish, ruthless barracuda, lacerating conger eels, berserk tarpon, and blood-curdling sharks in locales as exotic as the Amazon, Catalonia, the Dominican Republic, Senegal, and even in our own backyards.

This anthology gathers selections from fiction, nonfiction, and government documents that chronicle the splendor, the exploitation, and the controversies surrounding this extraordinary and much-loved alpine lake. Some selections have not appeared in print since their original publication, while others have not been republished or excerpted for decades.

A profusion of sonnets rises from a single circumstance: Sophie Klahr’s experience of driving thousands of miles alone while listening to the radio, where unexpected landscapes make listening to the unexpected more acute. Accompanied by the radio, Klahr’s experience of land is transformed by listening, and conversely, the body of the radio is sometimes lost to the body of the land. The love story at the core of this work, Klahr’s bond with Nebraska, becomes the engine of this travelogue. 

This inspirational memoir chronicles the six-decade quest of packer and outfitter Arnold “Smoke” Elser to protect wild lands by bringing thousands of people deep into the mountains of Montana on horseback. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews, Hush of the Land tells the captivating story of Elser’s early days as a packer in the Bob Marshall Wilderness and Bitterroot Mountains. 

A superb writer and an exacting researcher, Bain conjures up a marvelous sense of coming unstuck in time as he lingers in the ghost towns and battlegrounds, prairies and river ports, trainyards, museums, deserts, and diners that line his cruise west to California. Bain encounters a fascinating cast of characters, both historic and contemporary, as well as memories of his grandparents and the journeys that shaped his own heritage.

Over the past four decades, Bruce L. Smith has worked with most big-game species in some of the American West’s most breathtaking and challenging landscapes. In Stories from Afield, readers join Smith on his adventures as a naturalist, sportsman, and wildlife biologist, as he pulls us into the field of learning and discovery across wilderness areas of western Montana, the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and a South African temperate forest.

In Framing Nature, Yolonda Youngs traces the idea of the Grand Canyon as an icon and the ways people came to know it through popular imagery and visual media. She analyzes and interprets more than fourteen hundred visual artifacts, including postcards, maps, magazine illustrations, and photographs of the Grand Canyon, supplemented with the words and ideas of writers, artists, explorers, and other media makers from 1869 to 2022. 

In this memoir Marks depicts a Foreign Service officer’s daily life, providing insight into the profession itself and what it was like to play a role in the steady stream of history, in a world of quotidian events often out of the view of the media and the attention of the world. Marks’s stories—such as rescuing an American citizen from a house of ill repute in Mexico and the attempt to recruit mongooses for drug intervention in Sri Lanka—are both entertaining and instructive on the work of diplomats and their contributions to the American story.

Jessica Cherry and Frank Soos’s diverse group of stories covers cycling both past and present. From riders commuting in every kind of weather to those seeking long-distance adventure in the most remote sections of the United States, these stories will inspire cyclists to ride into their own stories in Alaska and beyond.

It’s the new millennium and the anxiety of midlife is creeping up on Sam Singer, a thirty-seven-year-old art advisor. Fed up with his partner and his life in New York, Sam flies to Berlin to attend a gallery opening. There he finds a once-divided city facing an identity crisis of its own. In Berlin the past is everywhere: the graffiti-stained streets, the candlelit cafés and techno clubs, the astonishing mash-up of architecture, monuments, and memorials.

The Nebraska Sandhills features nearly forty essays about the history, people, geography, geology, ecology, and conservation of the Nebraska Sandhills. Illustrated with hundreds of remarkable color photographs of the area, this is the most up-to-date and illuminating portrayal of this remarkable yet largely unknown region of the United States.