Little Brown and Company, 2015

Cabin Porn is a beautiful, beautiful book. It’s an exercise in voyeurism, really, a window through which those of us shackled to our corporate cubicles and our safe and comfortable homes in the cities and the suburbs can ogle those who have abandoned that comfort to live in the woods, in a jungle, on an island, in the desert – real DIYers who (no offense to your macramé kittens, encaustic sculpture or arduino robots) have built homesteads, earth homes, yurts, and tree houses… and live in them.

An offshoot of cabinporn.com (Inspiration for that quiet place somewhere.), Cabin Porn (the book) is comprised of nine stories (ten if you count editor, Zach Klein’s introduction about how he and a couple dozen friends put together a DIY commune in upstate New York) of modern-day Thoreaus. Written by Steven Leckart with photographs by Noah Kalina, each of these is an inspirational biographical sketch of the efforts of these individuals who basically built really cool dwellings in some exceedingly off-grid places. And each of these is followed by a smattering of drool-inducingly gorgeous photographs of similarly mind-blowing handmade dwellings from around the world.

Photos and a book trailer at the Cabin Porn book website. You can also follow @CabinPorn on Twitter.

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Mark Flanagan

Formerly About.com’s contemporary literature guide and a Kirkus Reviews contributor, Mark is the founding editor of Run Spot Run. He was also progenitor and co-conspirator behind Infinite Winter, a ridiculous thirteen week dive into Infinite Jest he'd love an excuse to reprise. He typically refrains from referring to himself in the third person.

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