It can be easy to forget, but humans are a part of nature, as the poet Mary Oliver made clear in her work and life, spending hours a day in the Cape Cod woods. A new documentary about Oliver, among the films and TV shows featured in To Watch or Not to Watch, our monthly guide to literary adaptations, makes this plain with beautiful and startling imagery. Elsewhere, we talk with journalist Cal Flyn about her travelogue The Savage Landscape, which dives into the human history of wilderness spaces.

Other books hitting shelves next week include Valeria Luiselli’s remarkable novel Beginning Middle End, about a mother and daughter differing over the meaning of their family legacy while traveling through their ancestral region of Sicily. Speaking of mothers and daughters, Andrea Eames’s “Rapunzel”-inspired fantasy, A Tangled Magic, follows a young woman's search for her missing mother, while Elizabeth Lim’s Fishbone Cinderella features a mother who discovers a life-saving ability to become invisible.

Happy reading!

—David Varno