A new pick from our subscribers' submissions
Plus the best-written recent nonfiction
Every week we identify the best-written works of fiction, speculative fiction, and nonfiction from recent releases and shortlists for major prizes, and from our subscribers’ submissions. We also publish articles by their authors on prose technique and AI writing, while on the last Friday of the month we publish for paid subscribers the best-written book of the month.
Pick 1. Recently published nonfiction»
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice * ‘Sparkling, addictive reading’—MAGGIE O’FARRELL * ‘An unforgettable literary biographical tour de force’—INDEPENDENT
To a sophisticated Italian who traveled to England in the late sixteenth century, the island might not have appeared, as it had to the ancient Roman poet Virgil, “wholly separated from all the world.” But it would certainly have seemed bleak. To be sure, in London the visitor would have seen many signs of wealth and power: the sprawling royal residence of Whitehall; grand dwellings along the Thames for the leading aristocrats and their entourages; the magnificent abbey at Westminster housing the royal tombs; in the busy commercial center paved streets, some of them graced with beautiful fountains; a brooding fortress, said to have been built by Julius Caesar and used in the sixteenth century as a prison, a mint, an armory, and the site of a royal menagerie. But there was much else that would have given a foreign visitor pause.
The weather was a trial. England, along with much of northern Europe, found itself in the midst of what is now termed the Little Ice Age, with bitter cold winters and fierce storms that destroyed crops and caused periodic famine. The roads were terrible, and after dark they were the haunts of robbers. In London the most popular entertainments were animal fights. Large crowds paid to see a horse with a monkey on its back attacked by fierce dogs. The poor beleaguered horse would gallop and kick; the monkey would scream; the audience would roar. When the exhausted horse collapsed and was killed, it would be time to bring out the bears and bulls, tie them to stakes, unleash the dogs, and repeat the fun. “This sport,” remarked a visitor from the Continent, “is not very pleasant to watch.” In the churches psalms were sung and Mass was celebrated not in the time-honored Latin but in plain English. The Reformation had left other, more tangible marks as well. “It is a pitiful sight,” wrote an Italian merchant who kept a journal of his visit to London in 1562, “to see the beautiful marble statues of saints and other decorations there, broken and ruined because of their heresy.” In the streets, foreigners were advised to keep a low profile, since the crowds could be suspicious or hostile.
Our pick is here (US/Canada)»
UK/Ireland»
The list of recent nonfiction titles we considered is here.
Pick 2. Subscribers’ submissions»
Praise for the author of our latest pick:
“This beautifully written book demonstrates just how good nature literature can be.”—Edward O. Wilson
“The marriage of a great writer and a great subject is always a joy to behold.”—Bill McKibben
I boarded a crowded plane in the wee hours of 14 March 2020. Having spent twelve days in Costa Rica ignoring the media, in the company of fourteen naturalists, hummingbirds, macaws, and rainbow-colored frogs, I wasn’t disquieted by mention of Covid-19. The coronavirus was an Asian problem, a European problem, remote from the remoteness of jungle twilight and its enhancement of bright green moths.
I had just finished guiding a nature tour with my Costa Rican friend Gilbert Calvo Morera. Gil has piloted six tours with me in the past twenty years. He’s an ample, affable, highly energetic ambassador for everything Costa Rican, a natural historian par excellence. Like a godwit migrating over open ocean, Gil imbues unshakable confidence and self-acceptance. He laughs easily, leads tours with lighthearted dignity, molds strangers into friends, friends into family, family into a nucleus of one. Our family ate together; hiked together; debated the identity of unknown birds and butterflies; watched a resplendent quetzal stir the dawn with long, green, pendant plumes, each thin as a swizzle stick. After twelve days, we had become acculturated, assimilated, associated—a tender, mobile unit verging on dispersal. Then, our sad goodbyes. My god… we had no idea what was behind the curtain.
Our pick is here»
It’s also available as a Substack series here»
Read on below for the author’s answers to our questions on prose style and AI writing.
Please consider completing our reader survey or clicking the Like (heart) button to help spread the word about the only publication set up solely to champion beautiful prose and battle the Replicant Voice.
Information about submitting to Auraist is here. If we publish your work, we’ll invite you to answer our questions on prose style. Your answers will be considered for inclusion in the print publication of these answers by many of the world’s best writers.
‘The song of a scarlet tanager reminds me of an American robin with a pack-a-day smoking habit or the raspy-voiced folk singer, Tom Waits.’
A lifelong naturalist and Yankee fan, Ted Levin follows a trail blazed by John Burroughs and John Muir, neither of whom paid baseball much attention. His work has appeared in Audubon, Sierra, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, Newsday, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph, among many other publications.
He is the author of Backtracking: The Way of a Naturalist (1987), Blood Brook: A Naturalist’s Home Ground (1992), and Liquid Land: A Journey Through the Florida Everglades (2003), among other works of nonfiction. He won the Burroughs Medal in 2004, the highest literary honor awarded to an American nature writer. E. O. Wilson called America’s Snake: The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake (2016) ‘a beautifully written book [that] demonstrates just how good nature literature can be’. Ted divides his time between the deck and the road.
In your early writing career, were there writers whose sentences permanently affected the standards of your reading and your own writing aspirations? Could you tell us some lessons you learned about prose style from these writers?
Popular science magazines and refereed journals fed my quest for knowledge, where I went (and still go) to gather the facts that interest me. But as a young writer, I was drawn to beautiful prose, to landscape writers who painted with words, who created images that stuck, whether fiction or nonfiction.
Because I grew up by the sea, my early heroes were John Hay, who covered Cape Cod (The Great Beach, The Run, and The Undiscovered Country among others) and Peter Matthiessen, who covered many topics including the outer beaches of Long Island (Men’s Lives, The Wind Birds, Wildlife in America).
And, every Sunday morning, the editorials of Hal Borland chronicled the seasons for The New York Times. I collected Borland’s short essays in a scrapbook, each as cherished as a baseball card—he collected them in books, Sundial of the Seasons (1964) and An American Year (1973), and, posthumously, Hal Borland’s Book of Days (1976) and Twelve Moons of the Year (1979).
“No night,” wrote Borland, “not even the Winter, is quite as dark and as silent as it seems.” Borland drew me in, left me with something to consider (or reconsider). Made want to be a writer. He (and Hay and Matthiessen) encouraged me to engage the wild world.
As a naturalist, facts and personal observations are imperative, but as a writer, I wanted to indulge the ebb and flow of the seasons, then translate weather into words, and the geological bones of land into the lyrics of dawn.
Stuck at home during Covid, I journaled to stay emotionally afloat. I gave myself a task: to approach my home ground the way I had approached distant landscapes and exotic creatures. The writings of Borland, Hay, and Matthiessen taught me to immerse myself in the familiar, then write with vigor; lure the reader with color, sound, texture, and analogy. Tell my story, using facts like spices to draw out the flavor of the piece. Find my rhythm.
Fact: Turkey vultures are in the sky almost all day looking for carrion; they nest in boulder fields.
Interpretation: “Born on a breeze, hatched amid a fortress of stone, turkey vultures are the essence of a hot summer day.” I want the reader to see the vulture, to feel the heat of an August afternoon.
Fact: Bobcats are medium-sized predators, tawny-colored wildcats that pad quietly along a woodland trail. They have round heads, yellow eyes, and upright ears.
Interpretation: “Silent feet. Coat of twilight, face like a frayed softball. Sideburns flare, ear straight up. Searchlight eyes, mustard-colored and slashed by vertical pupils—the original cat’s-eye marble.”
Every species has a unique cadence and pattern. The song of a scarlet tanager reminds me of an American robin with a pack-a-day smoking habit or the raspy-voiced folk singer, Tom Waits. If a comparison gets my point across, why not compare? A catbird improvises, scat master of the underbrush; a hermit thrush’s voice is ethereal and haunting, a blueberry-voiced songbird; a barred owl gives the night meaning. The older I get, the more I risk making a point. To hell with not anthropomorphizing.
My reading interests (and the literary lessons I learned) were not restricted to nonfiction. While unspooling fiction, Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy bring readers into the landscape. The loneliness and isolation of Newfoundland, Wyoming, and the Borderlands are as central to the development of their novels as the people who inhabit them. Peter Matthiessen’s Everglades trilogy—Killing Mister Watson (1990), Lost Man’s River (1997), and Bone by Bone (1999)—later reissued as Shadow Country (2008)—transformed a flat, wet, mosquito-ridden wetland into the outpost for a desperate man.
Through eyes of Proulx, Matthiessen, and McCarthy the landscape and the people who lived there reflected each other. My goal as a nature writer? Engagement… let the reader wander with me. Paint my home ground, using the rhythms of the morning: the jittery nature of sparrows; the slow uncoiling of a snake; the sudden abundance of light as the sun crests the hill and hemorrhages color.
What reflections does sunrise provoke? How does seeing a bobcat or a goshawk make me feel?
I have never taken a writing class or attended a writing workshop (though I’ve taught in a few), which may be evident in my championing the ellipsis and em-dash (I love them both; they add visual character to a page). But I read, read, read. I’m drawn to colorful, declarative sentences, vivid descriptions that transported me somewhere and teach me something, often embedded in deeply personal stories.
In junior high and high school, I read Donald Culross Peattie (A Natural History of the Trees of Eastern and Central North America), Karl Kauffeld (Snakes and Snake Hunting and Snakes: The Keeper and the Kept), and Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher’s Wild America. I read Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac) and Rachel Carson (The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea, Under the Sea Wind, and the immortal Silent Spring) in college, and the poetry of Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and Gary Snyder in graduate school.
Kauffeld et al showed me the possibility of living a dream, a life outdoors. Leopold and Carson gave me gorgeous sentences for noble causes (conservation); Oliver, Berry, and Snyder stunned me with muscular, pithy language. Wrote Oliver, “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” I loved Annie Dillard’s Pilgram at Tinker Creek, James Galvin’s The Meadow, and J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, which all seemed to follow Oliver’s prescription.
Now, more than ever, I’m drawn to poetry, to concise, provocative language. Writing The Promise of Sunrise, a condensation of my chronicled Covid days, while describing and evoking connections to the landscape of home and unwinding bits of my own history, portions of each page morphed into block poetry—a geometry of observation.
As a writer (and a human), I am a work in progress who feels deeply about the forces that shape and reshape Earth. At a young age, the woods and the shore became my synagogues. Birds and snakes … my high profits. Darwin tied my world together, everything that ever lived to everything that ever will.
As a naturalist who strives to learn and has learned—sometimes painfully—to write, change has also been my own constant, the only assurance in the equation of life. Having grown up in the sixties, swaddled in rock and roll, I witnessed Dylan ditch folk for rock, experiment with country, gospel, and the blues; the Beatles progress from bubblegum (I Want to Hold Your Hand) to august (Golden Slumbers and Let It Be) to disbanding.
How does the land make me feel? How does my past color my present, the possibilities of my future? Hay, Borland, and Matthiessen translated the beauty and transparency of our world to me. The poets gave me boiled-down language. Carson, Dillard, and Leopold made want to pick up a pen (and, later, tap a keyboard and a cellphone).
Without being prompted to copy the style, could AI ever write as well as these writers?
No way. AI writing reminds me of the soon-to-be-installed automatic home-plate umpires in baseball, which will be used to referee disputed ball-and-strike calls. Officiating baseball is unpredictable just because of the human element. There will be no arguing a decision based on electronics. No kicking dirt on an umpire’s shoe when you disagree with his call. With an automated strike zone, baseball will lose some color.
AI has no senses, cannot register feeling. No history of observation. No history of contemplation. Really, AI has no history beyond the mathematical probability of a decision based on the amount of input. AI is helpful to correct spelling errors (I was always among the first to take a seat in a grade-school spelling bee), give suggestions about misplaced modifiers, and relay possibilities of punctuation, but AI can’t face the wind, nor can it watch a peregrine shred the sky.
Nature writers are shaped by communion with the forces of life; AI is shaped by digital engineers … there’s no authenticity, none whatsoever. Fuck AI.
(Continues below)
‘Editing and editing and editing some more cannot be overstated. You boil down forty gallons of maple sap to get one gallon of syrup.’
When did you realise you had found your writing voice? What exactly had you found? Has this happened more than once?
Although I wrote punchy tales of giant ants and spiders attacking my neighborhood in elementary school (friends and enemies were featured), my writing voice did not develop in school. I was an inveterate daydreamer. My attention was out the window, not on the blackboard.
Term papers in college and, later, letters to friends helped shape my voice. In 1981, I began a syndicated weekly newspaper column that gave me a platform to develop a voice—and a vehicle for experimentation. And the confidence of sustained production, often at the last minute.
With America’s Snake: The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake (2016), people became more integral to my story. To describe snake-haters and snake-lovers, I read more fiction. Paid more attention to how The New Yorker authors portrayed characters.
The Promise of Sunrise became a personal journey, both an exploration of life within Coyote Hollow (my valley) and the unfolding of my own ragged story. During Covid, daily writing became as vital to me as breathing, and Substack afforded a home for my observations and musings and an audience who were also stuck at home.
Which stylistic issues mattered most when you were writing and editing THE PROMISE OF SUNRISE?
The Promise of Sunrise was driven by curiosity and passion, not by style (at first). I never intended to write a book. At its core, the five hundred and twenty-six days I journaled, was a way to pass the soulless Covid time alone at home in east-central Vermont.
Once I realized I had the scaffolding for a book, the most significant decisions were what to keep, what to chuck, what to combine, and most importantly, how to seamlessly become a bigger part of my own story. Editing and reediting meant tightening, drawing out the poetry of sunrise.
Since the foundation of The Promise of Sunrise had been written piecemeal, day by day, over a year and a half, change itself became a character, an underlying constant, as did the love of home. I want the reader to find joy and discovery in their own home ground as I did in mine.
To be clear, based on a pair of books I wrote while living in Coyote Hollow, I knew more about the Florida Everglades than I did about my own wetlands, had associated more with timber rattlesnakes than my own dooryard birds. Finding and conveying that wonder, employing words as splendid trinkets … whatever it took—long sentences, short sentences, stand-alone phrases, quirky analogies, vivid descriptions, rock-hard verbs—that became my style.
Editing and editing and editing some more cannot be overstated. You boil down forty gallons of maple sap to get one gallon of syrup. Boiling down each day’s entry (on that day) and the entire first-draft was essential, time-consuming, and, most importantly, enjoyable. Of course, you must know when to stop. (Or have someone in your life to tell you, “Enough is enough.”)
This is the OED’s definition of literary: ‘having a marked style intended to create a particular emotional affect’. Does this match your understanding of the term?
Yes. Literary writing provides a global perspective, a lens on something fresh, often written in a new or unexpected way.
Take us through the stylistic choices you made for your book’s opening lines above.
I’m not sure I understand what style is, really. I knew the structure I wanted. Covid had made us all isolated victims. How did I spend my unplanned staycation? To set that up, I had to introduce myself by explaining where I had just come from. Then, I had to introduce both my home ground (Coyote Hollow), its position in the bigger geographic neighborhood (Connecticut River Valley), and my history in the Hollow—raising my boys, losing my wife to cancer.
To do that—to keep my writing fresh without being maudlin—I needed vivid images and renovated language that would draw the reader in and make them curious about someone who performed the exact same routine every day for eighteen months yet thrived on change … the seasons, the days, the moments, the memories.
What techniques were key to the voice and tone here, and/or in any other passage from the book?
In the very beginning, as I fed daily pieces to Substack, I entertained myself by having fun with language and descriptive scenes. Then, as my audience grew and began to correspond with me, I realized readers stuck at home like me want to know more about my situation. I began to let lyricism propel the narrative, to paint with words—both my exterior and interior landscapes.
From Day 161, An Introduction:
Although the boys loved the wonders of nature and appreciated life’s grand
diversity, for quite a while after their mother died, I hardly took them anywhere
Whenever we traveled as a family, Linny had been the organizer, the program director.
I had been the consultant, the mule, the cheerleader. She would remember the toys,
the books, the snacks, the toenail clippers. After Linny died, life without a compass
seemed best lived closer to home.
Amid discussing why and how leaves change color, I looped in personal pre-literature, fodder that had lived in a box in a dark closet for decades. Didn’t everyone write weird stories in elementary school? (I have no idea why I had saved this.)
From Day 208:
8 November 1956. Third grade. I wrote a limited-edition book, Why Leaves Change Color, held together by brass split pins and illustrated with original crayon drawings,
mostly goldfish and flowers. While producing the short, hand-printed book, I spelled
vegetable three ways—vegitable, vagatible, vegetible—and shoehorned the letter n into twigs more than once, as in kinglets hover over the tips of twings. I discussed apples and potatoes, flowers, and groundwater, and described the kitchen fishbowl at some length.
Nowhere did I mention fall foliage.
Describe your approach to stylistic energy and richness in this opening, or in any other passage from the book.
From Day 125:
Merging the seemingly incongruous. After describing a parade of American robins that rushed around the upper pasture, dowsing for worms—perhaps the most familiar bird on the continent —I brought my girlfriend, Nancy, into the piece.
For the past three years, Nancy has neutralized emotional isolation and softened rough edges (at least, those not already petrified). She’s been a culinary and landscape advisor, a department-store-field-trip organizer, and a walking and hiking buddy. Reluctantly, I swim with her. Enthusiastically, I lie in rivers with her, water pouring over us. We’ve attended Atlantic waves and stared at a condor above Big Sur. Nancy introduced me to the plight of the homeless and convinced me to volunteer at the local food shelf, most of whose volunteers had begun to self-isolate at the onset of Covid. She allowed me to partially remake myself (no small achievement). We met on Match … Desire still swells with possibility even if we kiss with our masks on and I can’t see her indoors. Nancy and robins fill a void.
I’m not sure how this affected style, but I wanted to explore the idea that familiar and understood (or appreciated) may not be the same. My version of the Buddhist concept of Right View. To do that, I addressed the poetry of robins and the poetry of my girlfriend.
Can you describe how you achieved the rhythms here?
I’m left-handed. Writing with a pen is not an option … both the edge of my hand and the paper would have been smeared with ink. During my walks, I tapped or dictated notes into my cellphone. When I returned home, I shaped the thin soup into a chowder, wrote and rewrote the report, editing as I constructed each sentence. About a year in, I realized a book was taking shape.
Then, the second level of editing began. Once I determined what I was going to keep and what needed to be added, I wanted rhythm to unite the seemingly disparate pieces. And, as best I could, I tried mimic the rhythm of what each sunrise brought.
(Continues below)
‘AI has no capacity to stand on Hurricane Hill and report on the sun rising over Moose Mountain.’
Do you see published prose adapting to the writing people read online, much of it written in the characterless bloggy style established twenty years ago? Has published prose adapted to the reduced attention spans that apparently result from heavy internet use?
Unless I read to learn scientific facts, I don’t advance very far in mainstream social media. I rely on the New York Times for daily news and science reporting. Thus far, I have not been disappointed. If a subject doesn’t interest me much, I move on.
Many of the natural history magazines I subscribe to have become smaller and are published less often; stories are shorter. Some magazines appear gun-shy of controversial topics. (Offending current politics or offending big donors may be the reason.) As you suggest, shorter attention spans may also be the reason. Now that I’m older and don’t have to take assignments, I write for myself.
Writing gives me pleasure; knowing that others enjoy what I’ve written gives me even more joy. As I mentioned earlier, AI lacks human senses. I might be curious and read an AI-generated story. Still, AI has no capacity to stand on Hurricane Hill and report on the sun rising over Moose Mountain.
I often listen to AI read back my Substack posts. (I prefer the woman with the synthetic British voice.) Audible AI cannot determine which resume I intended or correctly pronounce the town of Fruita, Colorado. How could it possibly interpret sunrise?
Have you used AI to help with literary tasks? Would you consider using it for time-consuming tasks like identifying unwanted alliteration?
Yes, as I mentioned earlier, AI is beneficial in correcting my spelling. I wouldn’t know how to set AI on the task of unwanted alliteration. I run my graphs through Grammarly, which makes suggestions based on the criteria I select. Fifty percent of the time, I disagree with the suggestion, particularly when it seeks to strip the poetry from a graph. Grammarly balks at stand-alone phrases.
If a panel of AI judges awarded you a prestigious literary prize, would accept it?
Yes, if the prize were awarded somewhere I’ve always wanted to visit, say, the Brazilian Pantanal—watching jaguars has always been a desire. I’d be humbled by the opportunity and make sure the automatons knew it. If cash was also involved, so much the better.
Should writers always avoid cliché? If not, could you quote for us a use of cliché you admire?
I can tell you the cliché I’ve grown most tired of … “Let’s unpack (add anything you want here). If I were writing about iron pyrite (fool’s gold) or the current president of the United States, I’d find a way to use “All that glitters is not gold.”
Freshness, virtuosity, wit, and that elusive stylistic quality known as charm: how might a writer whose prose lack these qualities go about learning them.
Find your passion and immerse yourself in it. Read, read, read. Travel and experience different cultures. Volunteer at a food shelf. Know your home ground intimately: the weather, the geology, the birds, the insects that drive you to distraction, the people. I love to travel, but being stuck at home during Covid became a blessing … I witnessed my valley awaken every single morning. Pursue your interests.
George Saunders proposed on his Substack that it’s in the editing progress that literary voice can emerge—the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them. Is he right?
Yes, I agree with Saunders. I love the editing process. Writing is like sculpting; the more you chip and chisel, the more clearly the form reveals itself.
Eradicating unwanted alliteration, rhyme, and repetition of prefixes and suffixes from an entire book can that hundreds of hours, and might leave the writer with permanently blotchy eyes, unsightly facial twitches, and no love life. Would it be worth it?
Yes, I always strive for improvement. When things get dicey, I eventually take a long walk (or to the gym) to remind myself why I write in the first place. Intimacy and a good night’s sleep help, too. So does a Gin and Tonic or a Polish Mule.
How close did you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at certain minuscule prose issue you were working on in THE PROMISE OF SUNRISE, and what were those issues?
I often struggled to turn a more prosaic passage poetic, especially when discussing issues like climate change. The shifting dates for freezing and ice-out in Lake Champlain, or the increasingly earlier dates for the sap run in maple stands. At those points, I’d return to Rachel Carson for guidance ... Silent Spring is a beautifully written book about death.
Is this headbutting business why relatively few authors obsessively polish their writing?
I can’t speak for other writers. I can only say the more I polish my writing, the better I feel. Nobody ever said writing was easy. It’s hard to hit a curveball or slider unless you put time in the batter’s box. How Henry David Thoreau’s immaculate prose appeared in his journals on one pass, I’ll never know.
Recommendations
On March 10, 2026, Doubleday will publish Tom Junod’s In The Days Of My Youth I Was Told What It Means To Be A Man: A Memoir. I’ve known Tom since childhood. I knew his father, Lou. His brother Michael was my best friend. And for years, I read Tom’s stories in GQ, Esquire, ESPN, and The New Yorker. His father was one-of-a-kind (an apt cliché that works here), and Tom’s a gifted writer.
True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, by Lance Richardson, a brilliant biography of a brilliant (and complicated) man. Of course, Matthiessen was an early hero of mine, why won’t I recommend this?
Recommended Substack
Thanks for reading and helping to support fine writing.
Sean McNulty