Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness
By Michael P. Branch. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications/Roost Books (dist. by Penguin Random House), August, 2016.
This book of creative nonfiction explores environmental experience in the context of parenting in western Nevada’s rugged, high-elevation Great Basin Desert. Chapters combine humor, lyricism, natural history, and reflections on raising two young daughters in an extreme desert landscape. A number of chapters in Raising Wild have appeared in magazines that feature environmental literature, including Orion, Ecotone, Slate, Hawk and ...
Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780–1830
Ben P. Robertson, Editor. Lexington Books: Lanham MD, 2015. Contributions by ASLE members Molly Hall, Madison Jones IV, Seth Reno, and William Stroup.
Romantic Sustainability is a collection of sixteen essays that examine the British Romantic era in ecocritical terms. This international collection addresses the works of traditional Romantic writers such as John Keats, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Samuel Coleridge but also delves into ecocritical topics related to authors added to the canon more ...
Wordsworth and the Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century
Lisa Ottum and Seth T. Reno, Editors. University of New Hampshire Press: Lebanon, NH, 2016.
Situated at the intersection of ecocriticism, affect studies, and Romantic studies, this collection breaks new ground on the role of emotions in Western environmentalism. Recent scholarship highlights how traffic between Romantic-era literature and science helped to catalyze Green Romanticism. Closer to our own moment, the affective turn reflects similar cross-disciplinary collaboration, as many scholars now see the physiological ...
Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
By Lauret Savoy. Counterpoint Press: Berkeley, CA, 2015.
Trace won the 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. It was also a finalist for the 2016 PEN American Open Book Award, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Listen to a recent public radio interview on “To the Best of Our Knowledge.”
In this powerful and provocative meditation on place, race, and the unvoiced presence of the past, Lauret Savoy ...
Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology
Hubert Zapf, Editor. DE GRUYTER MOUTON: Berlin, April 2016.
The Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology features essays by ASLE members Scott Slovic, Kate Rigby, Hannes Bergthaller, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Alexa Weik von Mossner, Louise Westling, Suzaan Boettger, Catrin Gersdorf, Christa Grewe-Volpp, Nancy Easterlin, Axel Goodbody, Serpil Oppermann, Greg Garrard, Serenella Iovino, Elena Past, and Sylvia Mayer.
Ecocriticism has emerged as one of the most fascinating and rapidly growing fields of recent literary and cultural studies. From its regional origins in ...
My Last Continent
By Midge Raymond. Scribner: New York, NY, 2016.
An unforgettable debut with an irresistible love story, My Last Continent is a big-hearted, propulsive novel set against the dramatic Antarctic landscape.
It is only at the end of the world—among the glacial mountains, cleaving icebergs, and frigid waters of Antarctica—where Deb Gardner and Keller Sullivan feel at home. For the few blissful weeks they spend each year studying the habits of emperor and Adélie penguins, Deb and Keller can escape the frustrations ...
An Ecology of Elsewhere
By Sandra Meek. Persea Books: New York, NY, 2016.
Following her mother’s death, nearly twenty years after her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, Sandra Meek, a writer of “dazzling, intimate poems” (Library Journal) began traveling frequently through southern Africa. During this same period, she and her sister traveled the American Southwest with their declining father, confronting and healing from a difficult family history before his death. Whether describing a Namibian baby seal hunt, 1500-year-old Welwitschia plants living ...
Getting to Grey Owl: Journeys on Four Continents
By Kurt Caswell. Trinity University Press: San Antonio, TX, 2015.
Writer, teacher, and adventurer Kurt Caswell has spent his adult life canoeing, hiking, and pedaling his way toward a deeper understanding of our vast and varied world. Getting to Grey Owl chronicles over twenty years of Caswell’s travels as he buys a rug in Morocco, rides a riverboat in China, attends a bullfight in Spain, climbs four mountains in the United Kingdom, and backpacks a challenging route through ...
The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide
Edited by Christopher Cokinos and Eric Magrane; Illus. by Paul Mirocha. The University of Arizona Press: Tuscon, AZ, 2016.
A land of austerity and bounty, the Sonoran Desert is a place that captures imaginations and hearts. It is a place where barbs snag, thorns prick, and claws scratch. A place where lizards scramble and pause, hawks hunt like wolves, and bobcats skulk in creosote.
Both literary anthology and hands-on field guide, The Sonoran Desert is a groundbreaking book that ...
Ocean’s Laughter
By Tricia Knoll. Aldrich Press: Hemet, California, 2016.
Ocean’s Laughter combines lyric and eco-poetry to look at change over time in a small town on the northern Oregon coast. The poems pay homage to the raw beauty of the Pacific Ocean — and also record Knoll’s 25-year history of witnessing to dwindling shorebird populations and loss of habitat, increasing “non-wilderness” uses of the six-mile beachfront in Manzanita including driving on the beach and burning driftwood that stabilizes dunes for bonfires. Each Fourth ...