Writing in the grand American tradition of Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, Donovan Hohn is an "adventurous, inquisitive, and brightly illuminating writer" (New York Times). Since the publication of Moby-Duck a decade ago, Hohn has been widely hailed for his prize-winning essays on the borderlands between the natural and the human.

The Inner Coast collects ten of his best, many of them originally published in such magazines as the New York Times Magazine and Harper's, which feature his physical, historical, and emotional journeys through the American landscape.  By turns meditative and comic, adventurous and metaphysical, Hohn writes about the appeal of old tools, the dance between ecology and engineering, the lost art of ice canoeing, and Americans' complicated love/hate relationship with Thoreau.

The Inner Coast marks the return of one of our finest young writers and a stylish exploration of what Guy Davenport called "the geography of the imagination." (W.W. Norton & Company)

Award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of The Big Bang Theory to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to the film of Tommy Wiseau to the editorial meeting in which Paula Fox's work was relaunched into the world. Originally published in magazines such as The Believer, The New Yorker, and Harper's, these essays represent ten years of Bissell's best writing on every aspect of creation--be it Iraq War documentaries or video-game character voices--and will provoke as much thought as they do laughter.  What are sitcoms for exactly? Can art be both bad and genius? Why do some books survive and others vanish? Bissell's exploration of these questions make for gripping, unforgettable reading. (Vintage)

Donovan Hohn is the author of Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea, a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for both the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. His essays have appeared in such publications as Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Lapham's Quarterly, and The New Republic. A recipient of the Whiting Writer’s Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, Hohn spent a number of years editing essays, fiction, and literary journalism at Harper’s, and a few years as features editor of GQ. He has taught nonfiction in the MFA program of the University of Michigan and is now on the creative writing faculty of Wayne State University in Detroit. His second book, The Inner Coast: Essays, will be published by W. W. Norton in 2020.

Tom Bissell is the author of eight previous books, most recently The Disaster Artist, and has been awarded the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He writes frequently for Harper’s Magazine and The New Yorker.

Donovan Hohn & Tom Bissell present" The Inner Coast: Essays and Magic Hours