Packing up your bags to hit the road this summer? Don’t forget to grab an outdoor read! June is Great Outdoors Month at Syracuse University Press and, to celebrate, we’re sharing a 40% off discount code for all of our New York State and regional studies books. Explore books of poetry and short stories, as well as local history and celebrations of our unique environment and take a look at further selections in our sale below. Remember to use promo code 05SUN26 at checkout through the end of the month to save.

Wisdom of the Marsh takes an in-depth look at the Montezuma Wetlands Complex through the overlapping lens of environmental and social justice. Exploring the history of the land and its relationship with the people who inhabited it, writer Clare Howard and photographer David Zalaznik present a complete portrait of the marsh’s exploitation and restoration, providing a hopeful perspective through which to view our future. The many photos from Wisdom of the Marsh help to drive home the scenic beauty of the region, as well as the tireless effort of volunteers to preserve it.

In the fictional Adirondack towns of Silver Lake and Lost River, a colorful cast of residents coexist, sometimes unharmoniously, with seasonal visitors, travelers, hikers, and hermits. With vivid descriptions, Roger Sheffer chronicles both the ordinary and the odd events in this rural community in the collection, The Loon Counters. Olympic torch bearers, a mysteriously unseen-but-often-heard violinist, pushy hikers, and brooding art museum security guards dapple the lives of the wealthy Silver Lake and working-class Lost River folk. Familiar characters recur across stories, seasons, and locations, finely illustrating the subtle shifts in the life of an isolated Adirondack enclave. In these sixteen brilliantly crafted stories, Sheffer reveals the complex charm of the region, the sublime beauty found in quotidian details of everyday life, and the potent lure of the small places people carve for themselves in nature.

Straddling the Hudson where the river begins to narrow and twist in its journey, the Bear Mountain Bridge stands as an elegant memorial to the shifting industrial culture of the United States between the two world wars. Once the longest suspension bridge in the world and meant to serve as a necessary industrial connector while preserving the region’s scenic beauty, the Bear Mountain Bridge was a titanic undertaking that dramatically reshaped the Hudson Valley. Steel and Grit chronicles the story of the valley at a moment of great change. Drawing on a trove of archival materials, Barbara Hansen Cali traces the Bear Mountain Bridge’s construction, from the selection of the land to the role of Gilded Age icons, such as E. H. Harriman and financier J. P. Morgan, the formation of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, and the New Jersey women’s clubs that were pivotal to the final legislative efforts. Steel and Grit examines the importance of the Bear Mountain Bridge, both as a symbol of twentieth-century American ingenuity and as an enduring symbol of the Hudson Valley.

The Adirondack Forest Preserve is the largest publicly protected wilderness in the Eastern United States, with a state constitutional provision guaranteeing that it be “forever kept as wild forest lands.” But just what does “wilderness” mean today? How has our understanding of that concept shifted, from the colonial implications of the term as first applied to the Adirondacks to a more inclusive usage, still contested, today? Part memoir, part New York history, and part meditation, Wild Forest Lands explores the rhetorical and spiritual meaning of the Adirondack “wilderness.” Terrie revisits the literature and history of the region, reckoning with how his views on the places he has defended have evolved over time. Rich with detail, Wild Forest Lands grapples with the enduring power of the Adirondacks and what it truly means to preserve something that is, by nature, wild.