Fourteen books about nature by women writers

Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of three books, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Almost Famous Women, and How Strange a Season, now out from Scribner. She is currently writing a book on the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.

Bergman is a journalist, essayist, and critic. She has written columns on climate change and the natural world for The Guardian and The Paris Review. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Orion, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2011 and 2015, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She was awarded the Garrett Award for Fiction and the Phil Reed Environmental Writing Award for Journalism, and, previously, fellowships at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the American Library in Paris.

She currently teaches literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College, where she also serves as Director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference.

At Electric Lit Bergman tagged fourteen books "about our relationship with the natural world that subverts patriarchal norms," including:

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid

Kincaid—a devoted gardener and sharp observer—always integrates a stunning sense of the natural world in her books. A Small Place dives into the problematic, colonial mindset of tourism, and forever changed the way I think of the ethics of travel. This is essential reading for developing a critical sense of how to move—or not move—in the world.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue