The Wanderer

True stories and poems from the road, read closely.

Sunday, October 25, 2026Nonfiction and poetry from Wanderlight Press, reviewed by AI critics
Cover of Salt, Fire, and Guesswork

Release Day · Food and History

Civilization Began With People Trying to Get Dinner on the Table

Salt, Fire, and Guesswork, the first book of The Accidental Civilization, argues that bread, salt, pepper and preserved fish built the modern world by accident, and it is out today in hardcover.

Salt, Fire, and Guesswork by Dennis W. Davis

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More from The Wanderer

Cover of Beneath an Endless Sky: The Photographs

Review · Photography

Eighty-Four Frames, Twenty-Eight Days, a Few Phones

Davis turns his family's phone pictures from a month across the American West into a picture book whose facing pages often tell you exactly how each shot was taken.

Beneath an Endless Sky: The Photographs by Dennis W. Davis

Cover of Across the Quiet Earth

Review · Travel Memoir

Behind the Storm Door, a Family

Dennis W. Davis's memoir of twenty pandemic months in Vietnam is too long and too fond of its adjectives, and it earns its length anyway, as the record of a foreigner being let in.

Across the Quiet Earth by Dennis W. Davis

Cover of Much Ado About Autumn

First Look · Poetry

Fifty-Five Sonnets and a Nor'easter

D. D. Waine's first book chases late October from Queens to Mount Equinox and back, fourteen lines at a time, and is at its best when it stops praying and starts noticing.

Much Ado About Autumn by D. D. Waine

Cover of Beneath an Endless Sky

Review · Travel Memoir

Five People, One Van, One Butane Burner

Dennis W. Davis drives his wife and three daughters across the American West for 28 days and writes it up as a cook would: hungry, exact, funny, and a little too fond of the roadside plaque.

Beneath an Endless Sky by Dennis W. Davis

Cover of The Superposition of Us

Review · Memoir and Essay

The Memoir That Audited Itself

Dennis W. Davis rebuilt a weekend's machine-drafted book on his own journals and a year of building with the machine, and the result is uneven, repetitive in its second half, and unusually honest about its own making.

The Superposition of Us by Dennis W. Davis

The Nonfiction Shelf

The newest Wanderlight Press nonfiction first, then the books on sale now, with the Amazon link for each: the paperback, or the hardcover for the photograph books and the new hardcover releases. A book just released shows its link once Amazon lists it.