The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New [9780062432971]

Overview

In recognition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the author herself.

“A writer who never seems tired, who has never plodded her way through a page or sentence, Dillard can only be enjoyed by a wide-awake reader,” warns Geoff Dyer in his introduction to this stellar collection. Carefully culled from her past work, The Abundance is quintessential Annie Dillard, delivered in her fierce and undeniably singular voice, filled with fascinating detail and metaphysical fact. The pieces within will exhilarate both admiring fans and a new generation of readers, having been “re-framed and re-hung,” with fresh editing and reordering by the author, to situate these now seminal works within her larger canon.

The Abundance reminds us that Dillard’s brand of “novelized nonfiction” pioneered the form long before it came to be widely appreciated. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life—a commuter chases snowball-throwing children through neighborhood streets, a teenager memorizes Rimbaud’s poetry—with beauty and irony, inviting readers onto sweeping landscapes, to join her in exploring the complexities of time and death, with a sense of 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.

Reminding us of the indelible contributions of this formative figure in contemporary nonfiction, The Abundance exquisitely showcases Annie Dillard’s enigmatic, enduring genius, as Dillard herself wishes it to be marked.

This landmark collection delivers the essential Annie Dillard:

• Unflinching Nature Writing: From a frog consumed by a water bug at Tinker Creek to an eagle locked in a death grip with a weasel, Dillard finds both terror and grace in the natural world.
• The Problem of Pain: Classic essays that confront the central question of a loving creator and a world of suffering, asking with unflinching honesty, "What in the Sam Hill is going on here?"
• Moments of the Sublime: Witness a total solar eclipse that feels like the end of the world or a mockingbird’s impossible drop from a rooftop—moments of pure astonishment, rendered in unforgettable prose.
• A Lyrical Memoir: Revisit a Pittsburgh childhood through excerpts from An American Childhood, from the thrill of being chased for throwing a snowball to the mysteries of waking up to the world.