The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

in recognition of this pulitzer prize winning author s lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work the abundance includes the best of Annie Dillard s essays, delivered in her fierce and muscular prose, filled with absorbing d [...]
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in recognition of this pulitzer prize winning author s lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work the abundance includes the best of Annie Dillard s essays, delivered in her fierce and muscular prose, filled with absorbing detail and metaphysical fact. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life a commuter chases snowball-throwing children through backyards, a bookish teenager memorizes the poetry of Rimbaud with beauty and irony. These essays invite readers into sweeping landscapes, to join Dillard in exploring the complexities of time and death, often with wry humor. On one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.Marking the vigor of this powerful writer, The Abundance highlights Annie Dillard s elegance of mind. Annie Dillard s books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event. Marilynne RobinPraise for Annie Dillard and The Abundance Radical, funny, and moving, the brilliant essays of Annie Dillard call us to see and hear the things of our own real world, strikingly limned in shimmering prose as original now as the moment she first began. Hers is a body of work like no other, and The Abundance, a necessary collection. Lee Smith Like a jar of fireflies, The Abundance dazzles both in its tiny, blinking specifics and in its cumulative glow. Annie Dillard s wise and funny essays remind us of what a profound blessing life can be if we do but one thing: Pay attention. Garry Trudeau In essay after essay, Annie Dillard demonstrates the mystical art of using exactitude, condensation, and clarity to intimate turbulence, rapture, and plenty. Her advice and example in both living and writing has seeped into my bones; I will be eternally grateful. The landscape of nonfiction and American letters looks barren without her radiance. Maggie Nelson Dillard s really good. . . . Her writing] it raises hair on your body. In places you don t even have hair. David Foster Wallace The pleasurable voyages of Dillard s prose are grounded in alert observation springing into levitations of surprise and lit by eruptions of discovery. Robert Pinsky As observant as Thoreau, as thoughtful as Emerson, as all-embracing as Whitman, Annie Dillard is a great national treasure. Her nature writing is precise and irradiated with the spiritual. Edmund White"