James Howard Kunstler Books in Order

Leon Blumberg and his bunkmates head from New York City to a boys' summer camp in the New Hampshire woods. Their early 1960s adventures mix pranks, petty rebellion, and the half-wild freedom of being away from home.

Richie Schuster arrives at a small Vermont arts college hoping for the good life of teaching, marriage, and New England charm. Instead he watches his personal and professional world come apart in messy, comic fashion.

A former music writer living in rural New Hampshire discovers that Byron Jaynes, a rock legend believed dead for years, is alive in hiding nearby. Their friendship opens into a story of fame, collapse, and the wreckage of the 1960s.

In this picaresque historical comedy, Thomas Jefferson sends Samuel Walker and his botanist uncle south to look for a live giant ground sloth. Instead they find pirates, kidnappings, and one absurd American adventure after another.

Albany reporter Grover Graff starts digging into a sinister religious cult after a young woman vanishes. The deeper he goes, the more the case connects to violence, obsession, and danger close to home.

Four men on the edge of thirty drift through ambition, failure, money trouble, and old disappointments in an upstate New York town. A wild Halloween party forces their buried fears and fantasies into the open.

What starts as a camping trip and a half-serious Bigfoot hunt turns darker as two uneasy friends move deeper into the California woods. Old tensions, strange signs, and growing fear make the wilderness feel very close indeed.

In the summer of 1967, seventeen-year-old Andy Newmark takes a job at a shabby beach club on Long Island. Sex, rock music, family trouble, and the shadow of the Vietnam draft push him toward adulthood.

Annie Oakley rises from hard beginnings to become the star sharpshooter of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. The story keeps its focus on her nerve, skill, and showmanship.

This gentle retelling follows Johnny Appleseed through the Ohio Valley as he plants orchards, helps strangers, and leaves goodwill behind him. It leans into the kindness and folklore around the American legend.

Kunstler's breakout nonfiction book is a fierce history of suburban sprawl and the man-made landscape of modern America. He argues that ugly, car-dominated places have social costs far beyond appearance.

This lively retelling follows Davy Crockett from frontier boyhood to folk-hero fame. It presents the backwoods hunter and fighter as a larger-than-life American legend for younger readers.

After diagnosing sprawl in The Geography of Nowhere, Kunstler turns to remedies. He argues for walkable towns, civic beauty, and a return to places designed for human life instead of traffic flow.

Part travelogue and part argument, this book looks at major cities and asks what makes them beautiful, livable, or miserable. Kunstler uses those portraits to think hard about what has gone wrong in urban America.

Maggie Darling has built a polished empire around taste, domestic glamour, and perfect presentation. When her marriage cracks and her world starts tilting toward farce, she has to find out what remains beneath the brand.

Kunstler makes the case that cheap oil built modern life, and that its decline will bring a long era of disruption. He connects energy stress to food, transport, economics, politics, and the shape of everyday American life.

This short collection uses a series of Christian stories to reflect on Jesus Christ through grief, spiritual struggle, healing, and moments of grace. It is written as an inviting, faith-centered meditation rather than a theological argument.

After oil depletion, disease, and social breakdown, Union Grove, New York, is left to fend for itself. Narrator Robert Earle watches the town improvise a new way of living as rival factions test its fragile peace.

After overhearing a parental argument, eleven-year-old Jeff Greenaway becomes convinced he is an orphan. Just before Christmas, he runs away from Manhattan in search of a kinder life that may exist only in his imagination.

This three-act play traps three generations of one family at an Adirondack great camp while a national political breakdown unfolds beyond the trees. With power out and order fraying, old grievances become a survival problem.

Life in Union Grove is still precarious after the great unraveling. Scarcity, roaming violence, and a rising strain of religious fervor threaten the uneasy balance the town has managed to build.

This retelling follows Aladdin from tricked street boy to master of a lamp with a powerful genie inside. Magic brings wealth and love, but it also draws back the dangerous sorcerer who wants the lamp for himself.

Obsessed with a late-night horror host, young Jeff sneaks out of his Manhattan apartment and heads for a television studio. What he finds is less supernatural than show business, but no less weird.

Kunstler argues that modern America puts too much faith in technological fixes and not enough in reality. He takes aim at wishful thinking about energy, economics, politics, and the idea that ingenuity alone will save us.

Jeff Greenaway and his friend Bobby mean well, which is how Bobby's cat ends up attached to a homemade parachute above Central Park. The result is a city chase that is equal parts slapstick, panic, and wonder.

On a stormy Christmas Eve, Robert Earle's son Daniel returns to Union Grove after years of wandering through a broken America. His stories of what the country has become arrive just as the town is pulled into a murder case.

Jeff Greenaway thinks his rich classmate Lee Talbot has broken Wendy Waldbaum's heart, so he stages a bit of revenge in a museum. The fallout is funny at first, until Jeff learns how badly he misread the whole situation.

Union Grove has survived collapse, but peace is still fragile. As a strange camp of young wanderers appears outside town and old local tensions sharpen, Robert Earle and Brother Jobe face a new kind of threat.

In 1967, pregnant NYU student Erica Pooh Bollinger wants out of a city and a country that both feel unsteady. She heads to a Vermont commune, hoping for refuge, and finds adulthood arriving faster than she planned.

Jeff Greenaway is shipped off to a New Hampshire boarding school where a bully gang called the Ancients seems to run the place. To survive, he has to match their cruelty with brains, nerve, and a little comedy.

Sent to Camp Timahoe in Vermont for the summer of 1963, Jeff Greenaway expects the usual camp misery and mischief. Then the counselors begin disappearing, and the boys are left to invent their own rough, funny version of order.

Kunstler revisits the warnings of The Long Emergency and asks what he got right, what changed, and what still looks shaky. He mixes big-picture crisis thinking with portraits of people already building more local, resilient lives.

Days after JFK's assassination, twelve-year-old Jeff Greenaway returns from boarding school to Manhattan for Thanksgiving. Restless and newly under the spell of Holden Caulfield, he wanders the city into romance, danger, and a search for meaning.