A co-founder of the Paris Review and its first fiction editor, Peter Matthiessen received the National Book Award in 1979 for his memoir The Snow Leopard. His novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord was adapted into a film, and Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark, which chronicled the making of the 1971 film Blue Water, White Death, is widely believed to have inspired Jaws.

His latest book, Shadow Country, is a reworking of his lavishly praised “Watson” trilogy “one of the grand projects of contemporary literature” (San Francisco Chronicle). Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River and Bone by Bone were originally conceived as one vast novel that because of its length was broken up into three books. Now, in Shadow Country, Matthiessen has rewritten and distilled a monumental work into a richer, more deeply textured single novel, realizing his original vision.