Also of interest...in wintry escapes

Winter Recipes From the Collective

by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)

Fresh off winning the Nobel Prize for literature, poet Louise Glück is in no mood to celebrate, said Troy Jollimore in The Washington Post. Her new collection, consisting of 15 “brooding, death-obsessed” poems, feels like “an end-of-life book where the life in question could be anyone’s: the poet’s, the reader’s, the planet’s.” Don’t seek comfort here: “One’s impression is of small human figures huddled against a cold and empty landscape.” Even so, “reading Glück’s new poems is a joyful experience, as reading great poetry always is.”

Powder Days

by Heather Hansman (Hanover Square, $27)

Once a ski bum, always a ski bum, said David Shribman in The Wall Street Journal. In an “endearing” book that’s part memoir, part travelogue, Outside magazine writer Heather Hansman tours America’s most storied slopes while reminiscing about simpler days for the sport and her personal connection to it. “The result is a sparkling account of one woman’s passion and enduring love of powder,” and proof that, “as Peter Pan taught us,” you don’t have to grow up just because you grow older.

The Last Winter

by Porter Fox (Little, Brown, $28)

If winter is dying, at least we have Porter Fox to document its decline, said Cory Oldweiler in The Boston Globe. A “seriously terrific writer,” Fox traveled the globe to assemble this report about the shrinking season and the scientists working to save it. He has packed in “a truly anxiety-inducing blizzard of data”—including the projection that in parts of the U.S., winter may be 80 percent shorter by 2090. But you stick with him for his “utterly madcap” dispatches from the planet’s coldest places.

The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

by Nathaniel Ian Miller (Little, Brown, $28)

It’s not easy to write a “briskly entertaining” novel about a gloomy young protagonist who seeks the solitude of life in the Arctic, said Ian McGuire in The New York Times. But that’s what Nathaniel Ian Miller has done with his “surprisingly engaging” debut about a loner who flees Stockholm during World War I and learns to survive in a harsh new setting with the help of several likable eccentrics. Though the story ultimately feels “a little weightless,” it’s “consistently enjoyable” right to the final page.