The late poet, novelist, and essayist Jim Harrison soaked up every experience he could, and (Grove Press) gathers many of his best exploits—shark tagging, grouse hunting—into a rollicking but sentimental tribute to a life wholly lived. A modern master of personal storytelling, CJ Hauser also delivers a remarkable memoir in essays, (Doubleday). In the title piece, she breaks off her engagement and heads to the Gulf Coast of Texas to study whooping cranes, whose grace and fragility remind her it’s okay to have needs. (W. W. Norton & Company) collects writings by the Eastern North Carolinian Randall Kenan, who died in 2020. His love of family and Southern food resounds, as in an ode to scuppernongs and homemade wine that concludes: “You don’t drink life because it’s good for you, you drink life because it is good.”
