Reading List

Authors Like Jon Mooallem

Mooallem found his own face in a photograph taken a century before he was born, belonging to a bullfighter widely considered the ugliest man in Spain. That essay gives Serious Face (Random House, 2022) its title, and it sits alongside twelve others: a hospice director who lost three limbs and now works at the edge of dying, an aging Ontario farmer running a pyramid scheme in pigeons, an hour-by-hour reconstruction of an escape from the fire that destroyed Paradise, California, in 2018, and a Frenchman constructing a town at what he insists is the centre of the world. He has said the question binding them together is simply why we are not better than we are. Before that came Wild Ones (2013), about polar bears, whooping cranes and a butterfly, and really about what people project onto animals they are trying to save, and This Is Chance! (March 2020), which reconstructs the days after the 1964 Alaska earthquake through Genie Chance, the radio reporter who effectively held Anchorage together by broadcasting continuously. He has been a writer at large at The New York Times Magazine for more than fifteen years, contributes to This American Life and Wired, and lives on Bainbridge Island outside Seattle. The ten below split between the animals, the disasters and the strangers.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Essays and reportage · Nature, disaster, people · Three books · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Jon Mooallem, the closest match is Lulu Miller: Why Fish Don't Exist does exactly what he does, taking a scientific obsession and turning it into a question about how to live. For the animals, read Helen Macdonald, Sy Montgomery or Elizabeth Kolbert. For This Is Chance!, read Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell, which makes the same argument about how people behave in a catastrophe. And then read Sheri Fink, who found a disaster where they did not.

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10 authors like Jon Mooallem

01
The same question, differently asked · Closest match

Lulu Miller

American · Why Fish Don't Exist (2020)

Miller sets out to write about David Starr Jordan, the taxonomist who kept rebuilding his collection of specimens after earthquakes and fires destroyed it, and ends up somewhere much stranger: with Jordan's enthusiasm for eugenics, with the scientific consensus that the category “fish” does not actually exist, and with her own reasons for needing a story about persistence. She co-founded NPR's Invisibilia and now co-hosts Radiolab, and the book is built like the best kind of radio.

The nearest thing to Mooallem by anyone, and she blurbed his essays for a reason. Both take a piece of natural history, follow it past the point where it should stop being interesting, and let it turn into a question about how to be a person; both are funny in a way that makes the sad parts land harder. Miller is more openly autobiographical. If Serious Face worked on you, read this in one sitting.

— Lisanne
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02
People looking at animals, from Britain

Helen Macdonald

British · H is for Hawk (2014), Vesper Flights (2020)

H is for Hawk is about training a goshawk after the sudden death of her father, braided with the life of T. H. White, who trained one badly and wrote about it in 1951. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year in 2014. Vesper Flights collects shorter essays on swifts, migraines, mushrooms, nests, hares and the strange business of watching wildlife at all. She has worked as a falconer, a historian of science and a research fellow at Cambridge.

The same subject as Wild Ones — what people need animals to be — written from inside the need rather than at a reporter's distance. Macdonald is the finer prose stylist and the more raw of the two; Mooallem keeps a comic gap between himself and his own feelings that she closes entirely. Vesper Flights is the better match structurally, being a collection of magazine-length pieces on unrelated subjects that turn out to be about one thing.

— Lisanne

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03
What we are doing to the rest of it

Elizabeth Kolbert

American · The Sixth Extinction (2014), Under a White Sky (2021)

The Sixth Extinction travels to the field sites where species are being lost — Panamanian frogs, Great Barrier Reef corals, a rhino in Cincinnati — and won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2015. Under a White Sky is about the interventions built to fix earlier interventions: electrified rivers, engineered corals, proposals to dim the sun. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999.

The rigorous version of Wild Ones, and the two books work well in either order. Mooallem's subject is the human sentiment around conservation — the volunteers, the branding, the polar bear on the calendar — and Kolbert's is the science and the arithmetic underneath it. She is the drier writer and the more alarming one. Read her if Wild Ones left you wanting to know exactly how bad it is.

— Lisanne

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04
The curiosity with jokes attached

Mary Roach

American · Stiff (2003), Packing for Mars (2010), Fuzz (2021)

Roach reports the subjects other writers avoid: what happens to donated bodies, the mechanics of digestion, the unglamorous engineering of keeping people alive in orbit, and in Fuzz the question of what to do about wildlife that breaks human law — bears that raid houses, elephants that kill, gulls that steal. She goes to the labs and the field stations herself and keeps the footnotes as funny as the text.

The closest match for Mooallem's tone, and Fuzz is nearly a sequel to Wild Ones: both are about the awkward negotiation between people and animals that will not behave as the story requires. Roach is more purely comic and less inclined to let a piece turn philosophical at the end, which is exactly what Mooallem does. She also blurbed his essays, which tells you the affinity is mutual.

— Lisanne

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05
The animal as a person you know

Sy Montgomery

American · The Good Good Pig (2006), The Soul of an Octopus (2015)

The Soul of an Octopus is about spending years with octopuses at the New England Aquarium and in the wild, and taking seriously the question of what they experience; it was a National Book Award finalist. The Good Good Pig is about the runt pig she and her husband raised for fourteen years in New Hampshire. How to Be a Good Creature is a memoir told through thirteen animals she has known.

The warm end of the shelf Wild Ones sits on. Where Mooallem stands slightly back and reports on people's attachments to animals, Montgomery has the attachments and describes them without apology, which is a genuinely different and harder thing to do well. Read her if the whooping crane volunteers in Wild Ones struck you as more admirable than absurd.

— Lisanne

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06
How people behave when everything breaks

Rebecca Solnit

American · A Paradise Built in Hell (2009), Wanderlust (2000)

A Paradise Built in Hell examines five disasters — the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Halifax explosion, Mexico City in 1985, September 2001, New Orleans after Katrina — and argues that ordinary people improvise generous, functional communities in the ruins, while the authorities panic about looting that mostly is not happening. She has written more than twenty books on landscape, walking, feminism, hope and the American West.

The thesis This Is Chance! illustrates. Mooallem's Anchorage, held together by a woman with a radio microphone while the official structures were still working out what had happened, is a textbook Solnit case, and the two books are best read together. She provides the argument and the historical range; he provides one city, four days and a person you come to care about.

— Lisanne

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07
The stranger, taken seriously

Susan Orlean

American · The Orchid Thief (1998), The Library Book (2018)

The Orchid Thief began as a New Yorker piece about a Florida plant dealer arrested for taking rare orchids from a state preserve, became a book, and then became Adaptation (2002), a film about the impossibility of adapting it. The Library Book is built around the 1986 fire that gutted the Los Angeles Central Library and the man accused of setting it. She has been at The New Yorker since 1992.

The tradition Mooallem's magazine work belongs to: find someone with an obsession that looks ridiculous from outside, spend enough time to understand why it does not look ridiculous from inside, and refuse the easy joke. The Pigeon King essay in Serious Face is pure Orlean territory. She is the more elegant reporter; he is more willing to admit he does not know what to make of somebody.

— Lisanne

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08
Older than the genre · The landscape writer

Barry Lopez

American · Of Wolves and Men (1978), Arctic Dreams (1986), Horizon (2019)

Of Wolves and Men set the biology of the wolf alongside the folklore, the bounty campaigns and the Indigenous accounts, and asked what the animal had been made to carry. Arctic Dreams, which won the National Book Award in 1986, came out of years travelling in the far north with scientists and Inuit hunters. Horizon, published a year before his death in 2020, gathers a lifetime of journeys into one long reckoning.

The writer Wild Ones is standing on. Lopez established that a book about an animal is inevitably a book about what a culture needs that animal to mean, which is Mooallem's central argument three decades later, delivered without the jokes and at considerably greater length. He is slower and more solemn. Read Of Wolves and Men to see the idea in its first, most serious form.

— Lisanne
Every book by Barry Lopez →
09
The same magazine, the same register

John Jeremiah Sullivan

American · Blood Horses (2004), Pulphead (2011)

Pulphead collects fourteen essays written for GQ, Harper's, The Paris Review and others: a Christian rock festival, Axl Rose, an unexplained noise recorded in the deep ocean, a nineteenth-century Kentucky naturalist who invented a prehistory of America, and the two years Sullivan spent as a young man caring for the last of the Southern Agrarian writers. He is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and southern editor of The Paris Review.

The other great collection of American magazine essays from this generation, and the natural companion to Serious Face. Both writers work the same assignment structure — go somewhere on someone else's money, meet people the reader expects to mock, come back with more sympathy than anyone ordered — and both are honest about their own bafflement. Sullivan is more literary and Mooallem more openly moved.

— Lisanne

Every book by John Jeremiah Sullivan →

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10
The argument against him

Sheri Fink

American · War Hospital (2003), Five Days at Memorial (2013)

After Hurricane Katrina knocked out the power at a New Orleans hospital, exhausted staff decided which patients would be last for rescue, and a doctor and two nurses were later accused of injecting some of them with life-ending drugs. A grand jury declined to indict the doctor in 2007 and the charges against the nurses were dropped. Fink, who holds an MD and a PhD, spent six years and more than five hundred interviews on it, and the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The counter-example, and the reason to read it directly after This Is Chance!. Mooallem and Rebecca Solnit both show communities improvising decency when the systems fail; Fink documents a place where the systems failed and decent, exhausted people made decisions that are still being argued about twenty years later. Neither account is wrong. Reading them together is the only honest way to hold both.

— Lisanne

Every book by Sheri Fink →

Authors like Sheri Fink →

Where to start if you loved Jon Mooallem

If you want the closest match, read Lulu Miller.

Why Fish Don't Exist. A taxonomist, an earthquake, and a category that turns out not to exist.

If you loved Wild Ones, read Helen Macdonald.

Vesper Flights. Swifts, nests and the strange business of watching animals at all.

If you loved This Is Chance!, read Rebecca Solnit.

A Paradise Built in Hell. Five disasters, and the communities that improvised in the ruins.

If you want the essays, read John Jeremiah Sullivan.

Pulphead. Fourteen assignments, and a writer who refuses to be superior to anyone.

If you want the argument against it, read Sheri Fink.

Five Days at Memorial. The same catastrophe logic, with a much darker answer.

If you want more non-fiction of this kind

My shelf has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Jon Mooallem

Who should I read if I love Jon Mooallem?

Lulu Miller is the closest — the same move from a scientific obsession to a question about how to live. For the animal books, Helen Macdonald, Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Kolbert cover the emotional, the intimate and the rigorous versions of the same territory, and Mary Roach matches his comic timing. Barry Lopez is the writer Wild Ones stands on. For the essays, John Jeremiah Sullivan and Susan Orlean are the obvious companions. For This Is Chance!, read Rebecca Solnit for the argument and Sheri Fink for the counter-argument.

Which Jon Mooallem book should I start with?

Serious Face (2022), because it is thirteen self-contained pieces and you will know within two of them whether he is for you. Start with “A House at the End of the World”, about the hospice director B. J. Miller, or “We Have Fire Everywhere”, about a family escaping the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California. If you would rather have a single narrative, This Is Chance! (2020) is the one; Wild Ones (2013) is the earliest and the most digressive.

What is This Is Chance! about?

The Great Alaska Earthquake of March 1964, the most powerful ever recorded in North America, and the days immediately afterwards in Anchorage — told largely through Genie Chance, a radio reporter who went on air and effectively stayed there, relaying messages, reuniting families and holding a wrecked city together with a microphone. It is about improvisation and community in a disaster rather than about seismology, and it was chosen as a book of the year by BuzzFeed.

Is Jon Mooallem writing a new book?

Nothing has been announced as of September 2026. His three books appeared in 2013, 2020 and 2022, and he continues to write for The New York Times Magazine, where he has been a writer at large for more than fifteen years, as well as contributing to This American Life, Wired and San Francisco's Pop-Up Magazine. He has also worked on live and musical storytelling projects, including with members of the Decemberists.

What is the question behind Serious Face?

He has said it is why we are not better than we are. The essays are about people improvising under conditions they did not choose — a man rebuilding a life after losing three limbs, a farmer whose pigeon-breeding business turns out to be a pyramid scheme, a family driving through a wildfire — and the collection is interested in the gap between the composed face people present and the guesswork underneath it. The title essay is about finding his own face in a hundred-year-old photograph of a Spanish bullfighter.

Is Wild Ones a nature book?

Only partly. It follows three animals — polar bears in Manitoba, whooping cranes led south by an ultralight aircraft, and a rare butterfly — but the actual subject is the people around them: the volunteers, the tourists, the biologists and the marketing. Mooallem is interested in what a species has to represent before anyone will spend money saving it. If you want the science and the numbers instead, read Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction.

Where can I read Jon Mooallem's magazine writing?

Most of the best pieces are collected in Serious Face, which is the efficient route, and eleven of its thirteen essays first appeared in The New York Times Magazine over about fifteen years. Beyond that his work turns up in Wired, on This American Life and in Pop-Up Magazine's live shows. His site collects links to the individual pieces if you want to read them in their original form.

Should I read This Is Chance! or A Paradise Built in Hell first?

Mooallem first, then Solnit. This Is Chance! gives you one city, four days and a person to follow, which makes the idea concrete; A Paradise Built in Hell then shows you the same pattern across five disasters and a century, and explains why the official response so often assumes the opposite. Read Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial third if you want the case that complicates both.

Sources

List last reviewed 9 September 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“Why are we not better than we are?”

— Jon Mooallem, on the essays in Serious Face.

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