The Dark Mountain bookshop has a pair of stellar issues on offer this month as the year turns.
Issue 23: Dark Kitchen (£13.99) is a feast of stories, poetry and artwork that explore food culture in a time of converging crises – from the devouring agricultural machine to the restorative fermenting jar. In this book, we look deep into the belly of the beast: into the slaughterhouse knocker box; at starvation on the Arctic sea ice; in an elite dining room where endangered animals are on the menu. Among the clatter of our pans, we also remember the connections that nourish the living world: the Atlantic and Pacific salmon that feed the forests; the microbes that link the wild yeasts in Montana to the whiskered wheat of East Anglia to the sourdough loaves that feed a locked-down community in Australia.
Do check out some of its pages on our website! In Make An Altar of Your Tongue, Antonia Bertucci explores the sacrificial implications of Christianity and breastfeeding, and misogynistic taboos about the female body, and in Our Sweet Flesh, poets Nickole Brown and Emily Hasler serve up disconcerting dishes from the realms of fairy tales and rural Kentucky, negotiating the complicated politics of what we put in our mouths.
With recipes, poetry and production techniques – join us around our convivial kitchen table! Get your copy here.
Dark Mountain: Issue 21 (£12.99) revolves around the theme of confluence in all its complexity: both life-affirming and death-bringing, creative and destructive. Increasingly, the times we live in feel like a confluence of catastrophes: climate, ecological, political, cultural and existential. In the white noise of this chaotic merging, do we try to hold fast in the roiling current that threatens to carry us away? Or do we look to the words of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus – panta rhea, ‘everything flows’ – as we try to navigate the unknown river?
In an extract from the book, Charlotte Du Cann talks with the poet and ecological storyteller Sophie Strand about interstitial thinking, unruly connections and how to hold a ‘deep life’ practice in My Body the Ancestor, and In No Recipe, current featured mountaineer Max Jones celebrates the underground craft of a young cheesemaker in the Italian pre-Alps and ‘one of the truest and most honest foods’.
From modern-day lycanthropy tales to the melting waters of the Antarctic Convergence; the contributions of the 60 writers and artists in this book join to make new patterns in this meeting of waters. Get your copy here.
As with all our books, there are limited copies available, so do head over to our online bookshop and treat yourself (or others) to two classic Dark Mountain hardbacks to sink into through the winter season.
Offer closes at the end of January 2026