The Snow Leopard

“My favorite record of an animal voyage is a book that’s fluent in failure, Peter Matthiessen’s nonfiction masterpiece The Snow Leopard . . . the great perfect shock of The Snow Leopard is that Matthiessen never actually sees a snow leopard . . . that failure becomes a powerful lesson in loss, a chance to meditate on the tangled nature of visibility and invisibility.” —Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine

“A masterpiece that exceeds the boundaries of the travel genre and envelops you with its incredible prose.” —Wall Street Journal

“Stunning . . . Fiercely felt and magnificently written . . . [Matthiessen] has expressed with uncommon candor and no prospect of relief, a longing which keeps the soul striving and alert in us all.” —Washington Post

“A magical book, a kind of lunar paradigm and map of the sacred.” —The Nation

“A beautiful, magnificent book that gives off at once the resonance of a classic . . . One of the most wonderful accountsI know of journeying in our time.” —W. S. Merwin