Timber Press – Books -Narrative Nonfiction

A thought-provoking scientific narrative investigating ice patch archaeology and the role of glaciers in the development of human culture.

Glaciers figure prominently in both ancient and contemporary narratives around the world. They inspire art and literature. They spark both fear and awe. And they give and take life. In The Age of Melt, environmental journalist Lisa Baril explores the deep-rooted cultural connection between humans and ice through time. 

 Thousands of organic artifacts are emerging from patches of melting ice in mountain ranges around the world. Archaeologists are in a race against time to find them before they disappear forever. In entertaining and enlightening prose, Baril travels from the Alps to the Andes, investigating what these artifacts teach us about climate and culture. But this is not a chronicle of loss. The Age of Melt explores what these artifacts reveal about culture, wilderness, and what we gain when we rethink our relationship to the world and its most precious and ephemeral substance—ice.

A genre-bending blend of naturalism, memoir, and social manifesto for rewilding the city, the self, and society.

“Brown lives far from any conventional battlefield, but he is surrounded by the wreckage of a different war, and he, too, finds hope in cultivating the ruins of nature…A Natural History of Empty Lots is less a departure from the nature writing tradition than a welcome addition to its edgelands.” —New York Review of Books

A Natural History of Empty Lots is a genre-defying work of nature writing, literary nonfiction, and memoir that explores what happens when nature and the city intersect. 

During the real estate crash of the late 2000s, Christopher Brown purchased an empty lot in an industrial section of Austin, Texas. The property—abandoned and full of litter and debris—was an unlikely site for a home. Brown had become fascinated with these empty lots around Austin, so-called “ruined” spaces once used for agriculture and industry awaiting their redevelopment. He discovered them to be teeming with natural activity, and embarked on a twenty-year project to live in and document such spaces. There, in our most damaged landscapes, he witnessed the remarkable resilience of wild nature, and how we can heal ourselves by healing the Earth. 

Beautifully written and philosophically hard-hitting, A Natural History of Empty Lots offers a new lens on human disruption and nature, offering a sense of hope among the edgelands. 

Praise for the essay, “The Island”

“At once a short story, an essay, and a prose poem, ‘The Island’ reads both like a sketch for The Summer Book and a vignette of Klovharun … the text seems to change following mysterious tides from a timeless present to an urgent past.” —Hernan Diaz, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

Praise for Tove Jansson

“It could be said that everything she wrote is, in one way or another, about the creative interactions between art and reality or art and nature.”—The Guardian

“Her style is not at all ‘poetic’—quite the contrary. It is prose of the very highest order; it is pure prose. Through its quiet clarity we see unreachable depths, threatening darkness, promised treasures.”—Ursula K. LeGuin, The Guardian

“Tove Jansson was a genius, a woman of profound wisdom and great artistry.”—Philip Pullman

“It’s hard to describe the astonishing achievement of Jansson’s artistry.”—Ali Smith