Recommended Reading

Long before her international fame and a New York Times obituary, O-Six was just another fuzzy wolf pup in Yellowstone National Park’s Northern Range, a descendant of the 1995 gray wolf reintroduction. Her story is brought to life in American Wolf, a work of nonfiction with all the hot-blooded howling of a Jim Harrison novel—romantic drama, bloody turf wars, and seething tensions of social hierarchy among mammals of all stripes, from the wolves themselves to ranchers, ecologists, wolf-watching guides, and elk hunters. Drawing upon thousands of written and multimedia field notes, writer Nate Blakeslee tracks the intertwined lives of O-Six, Yellowstone ranger Rick McIntyre (who documented her every move), and local Wyoming resident Steven Turnbull, a hunter rooted in the ideals of fair chase and living off the land. A 2018 Banff Mountain Book Competition winner, Wolf is a riveting must-read for all who believe in the call of a wilder West.

In 1885, shortly after the Alaska Purchase from Russia and before the gold rush, the U.S. Army’s Lieutenant Henry T. Allen was ordered on a 1,200-mile expedition to map the Copper and Tanana rivers of Alaska’s interior. Little was known about the uncharted region at the time, other than frightening legends and a few true tales of previous adventurers who never returned. To the Bright Edge of the World, a novel by Pulitzer Prize finalist Eowyn Ivey, reimagines the journey through fictionalized newspaper clippings, letters, and vintage art and photos, navigating the reader back and forth from actual history to the realm of magical realism. As she carefully reconstructs the wilderness of the late 19th century northern frontier, Ivey also twists the usual Western expedition narrative with a leading female character and an emphasis on First Nations culture. Suspenseful, absorbing, and at times darkly mythical, this is a book made for winter cabin reading.

Touching upon sumo wrestlers, migrating vultures in Pennsylvania, tiger tourism in India, and, briefly, Star Trek: Enterprise, this collection of eight essays by Grantland and MTV News writer Brian Phillips roams widely across the globe and human experience. Wandering from sports writing to travel journalism to pop culture commentary, Impossible Owls perches somewhere between the warm humor of David Sedaris and the sharp social observations of Chuck Klosterman. While there are actual owls, the heart of these essays is the eyes-wide-open investigation of humanity in terrain both wildly remote and suburban. In “Lost Highway,” we meet professed alien abductees and explore forgotten towns along Route 66. “Out in the Great Alone” takes us on the Iditarod, but we spend more time with the locals than the racers. Owls is fun and curious, inviting us to consider that for all its shrinking, our modern world remains at least a little untamed and wonderfully strange.