Counterpoint: 634 books

"Todd Robert Petersen is crazy-talented, and the wild, weird, hilarious stories of It Needs to Look Like We Tried are just what’s called for in these bizarre, frightening times." —Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and Trajectory Everyone has a dream, an idea, a goal. But what...

The author of Wind, winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing, shares a memoir of depression and the cosmos. On the clearest nights in the darkest places you can see as many as two thousand stars. On what scaffolding are they hung? Jan DeBlieu began to wonder....

“A fresh, new take on painting . . . Original deep insights enliven the reader’s experience of what it is to create honest beauty in this world.” —Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones More than a half century after his death, David Park is recognized as one of America’s...

A remarkable, career-spanning collection of stories from the celebrated, award-winning New Zealand author. This “powerful collection” (Kirkus Reviews) of 28 short stories spans the length of Frame’s distinguished career and contains some of the best she wrote. None of these stories have...

McWilliams’s work has appeared in The Paris Review (online), The New Yorker (online), the New York Times, Harper’s, Washington Post, Texas Monthly, The Atlantic, Salon, Slate, The American Scholar, the New York Times Book Review, The Millions, and more He has been featured on several NPR programs...

The residents of a North Carolina town weather Hurricane Hugo, and other kinds of storms, in this “smart and funny” collection of linked stories (Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish). The days leading up to the impending disaster are not at all unusual—no portents, no signs of impending...

At the turn of the twentieth century, Arctic explorer Edward Mackley sets out to reach the North Pole and vanishes into the icy landscape without a trace. He leaves behind a young wife, Emily, who awaits his return for decades, her dreams and devotion gradually freezing into rigid widowhood.A hundred...

Leslie Zemeckis continues to discover the forgotten feminist histories of the golden age of entertainment, turning her sights on the lost stories of Sally Rand and Faith Bacon—icons who each claimed to be the inventor of the notorious fan dance Some women capture our attention like no others....

In this book, Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and both their natural and human histories. These four fields-walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable, knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested,...

Here are tales of fabulous advances made in anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, and linguistics, stories of the Anasazi, the "old ones" of the southwestern desert, of the great explorers, eccentrics, dreamers, scientists, cranks, and geniuses. "There's no end to the list, of course," Connell says,...

In this conservation classic, originally published fifty-five years ago, Fred Bodsworth tells the story of a solitary Eskimo curlew’s perilous migration and search for a mate. The lone survivor comes to stand for the entirety of a species on the brink of extinction, and for all in nature that is...

A novel about a young woman, and the couple who have adopted her baby, that is “as insightful as it is entertaining” (Booklist). In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, college student Maria finds herself in a predicament—unexpectedly pregnant at nineteen. Still reeling from the fresh discovery...

“Eminently quotable and passionately argued essays [by] farmers, philosophers, scientists, and environmentalists . . . Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review) Agrarian philosophy, a compelling worldview with advocates around the globe, encourages us to develop practices...

The former Uncle Tupelo and current Son Volt musician presents snapshots of the people and places he encountered during his decades-long touring career. In this collection of beautifully crafted autobiographical vignettes, Jay Farrar visits the places he’s journeyed to during his more than...