The Sierra Club Desert Reader is the inaugural volume in a new series of literary celebrations of the Earth"s biomes -- the major ecological communities that have shaped the collective human experience. This unprecedented, global anthology of fiction, poetry, folklore, natural history, travel commentary, and more, collected and introduced by a preeminent environmental writer, demonstrates the desert"s power to enthrall and inspire our finest thinkers and writers. Represented in this distinguished volume are poets from ancient China (translated by Ezra Pound), Egyptian inscriptions, the logs of Captain James Cook, and the chilling fantasies of Edgar Allan Poe. Among other names drawn from many genres are Charles Doughty, Marco Polo, Mark Twain, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, T. E. Lawrence, Bruce Chatwin, Edith Wharton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jorge Luis Borges, as well as classic desert advocates Mary Austin, John Muir, and Edward Abbey. Avowed desert rats and the city-bound -- anyone drawn to the magical realm of open skies and space and dust -- will find The Sierra Club Desert Reader a trove of literary riches.