DONOVAN HOHN

Donovan Hohn is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Knight-Wallace Fellowship. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside, among other publications. Moby-Duck was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Prize for Excellence in Journalism, and runner-up for both the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. A former features editor of GQ and contributing editor of Harper’s, Hohn now teaches creative writing at Wayne State University in Detroit. He lives with his family in Ann Arbor, where he has begun work on a second book.

Praise For The Inner Coast

Prize-winning essays on our changing place in the natural world by the best-selling author of Moby-Duck.

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.”

“By the end of The Inner Coast, it is clear that Donovan Hohn is not only attempting to understand the inner coast of America, that porous liquid border of the Great Lakes, the one some Michigan writers have called “the third coast.” Hohn’s careful explorations of the subjects presented to him by his new place also become markers along his own process of the intellectual and personal discovery of his psychological inner coast. It is there, in that landscape, where this book finds its thematic and its spiritual unity.” - Michigan Quarterly Review

“Deftly weaving literature, science, journalism, philosophy, the history of out-the-way locales, arcane skills like canoe building, and no small number of family secrets, Donovan Hohn offers with The Inner Coast a humane view of a world that, as Ernest Hemingway said, is a fine place worth fighting for. And well worth reading about, too.” - The LA Review of Books

“Tender and poetic, and a genuine feat of empathy”.— Publisher’s Weekly

“The Inner Coast explores our vulnerability to nature; in the spirit of Thoreau and Dillard, Donovan Hohn considers the joyous and brutal aspects of the natural world” - Outside Online

“Hohn finds some of those havens in the work of Thoreau, Evan S. Connell, Marilynne Robinson, and Matthew Power. Settle in and savor a keen mind with a laudable moral compass.” - Starred Kirkus Review

“Donovan Hohn has a genius for noticing the previously unnoticed and for writing about our environments with careful precision and a patient observer’s love of detail. He is a kind of contemporary archeologist, writing about what surrounds us, and he does so with uncommon grace and quiet eloquence. This is a wonderful book.” —Charles Baxter

“Donovan Hohn’s prose is as immaculate and quotable as any writer of his generation. And while you always sense his outrage about ecological calamity, and never doubt his moral engagement, his advocacy never feels hectoring. There’s no writer living or dead I would rather read on the reliably distressing topic of environmentalism than Donovan Hohn.” —Tom Bissell

“I’ve seldom encountered a writer with a better understanding of both the literary and journalistic ways and means of telling a true story. Donovan Hohn thinks clearly; he writes with eloquence and force.” —Lewis H. Lapham

“Donovan Hohn has a diviner’s capacity to tap into the source and the flow of a story, whether the ‘story’ is narrative or argumentative. His attention to the appearances of things—the false; the true—tunes the reader’s alert-addled animal brain to the meaningful, and the terrible. As the Earth begins to resist us, to remind us that how we’re living will be our undoing, Hohn’s work is that sad, happy thing, glinting in the sand: evidence of what a human mind could do, and what a human heart could yield.” —Wyatt Mason

PRAISE FOR MOBY-DUCK

“Hohn moves easily between the micro and the macro, weaving personal histories into science and industry as he roams… [He] seems to have it all: deep intelligence, a strikingly original voice, humility and a hunger to suss out everything a yellow duck may literally or metaphorically touch.” – Elizabeth Royte, The New York Times Book Review

“This is as much literary as an environmental expedition, though. It isn’t a book that bludgeons you so much as seeks to seduce you in – invites you to drift companionably alongside the author and his Flotees… At its best it is sublime… Here’s something original and eccentric and multi-faceted that tells you a good many interesting things about the world.” – Sam Leith, The Guardian

NPR, 'Moby-Duck': When 28,800 Bath Toys Are Lost At Sea, March 29, 2011