The abundance Narrative essays, old and new

Annie Dillard

Sound recording - 2016

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.

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COMPACT DISC/814.54/Dillard
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Subjects
Published
Grand Haven, Michigan : Brilliance Audio [2016]
Language
English
Main Author
Annie Dillard (author)
Other Authors
Susan Ericksen (narrator)
Edition
Unabridged
Physical Description
7 audio discs (8 hr., 4 min.) ; 4 3/4 in
ISBN
9781511362399
9781511362405
9781511362429
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

THE ABUNDANCE: Narrative Essays Old and New, by Annie Dillard. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Dillard selects 22 of her best pieces from the past four decades, including dispatches from coastal Maine and a New Age Catholic church. Across these essays, "her preferred method is to transform, through the alchemy of metaphor, natural phenomena into spiritual ones," Donovan Hohn said here. EVICTED: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond. (Broadway, $17.) In this wrenching account, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2016, Desmond, a Harvard sociologist, chronicles eight impoverished families around Milwaukee for whom eviction is a near-constant fear. While these tenants live in squalor, their landlords and others profit from their misfortune; the book casts light on how the poor are regularly exploited. NOT IN GOD'S NAME: Confronting Religious Violence, by Jonathan Sacks. (Schocken, $16.95.) Sacks, a rabbi, argues that religion must be part of the solution to combating what he sees as politicized religious extremism. Drawing on Genesis for guidance, he outlines an argument that justice and decency should prevail over loyalty toward one's own group. THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS, by Edna O'Brien. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) A mysterious outsider arrives in a small Irish town, leaving residents at turns curious and skeptical. There's reason for concern: He's a Balkan War criminal, but succeeds in transfixing the locals, who view him as a healer or holy man, until his secret comes out. His relationship with a young woman, her naïveté dispelled, threatens to upend her life, but she gains strength and confidence from the ordeal. O'Brien's "unsettling fabulist vision" recalls "Nabokov in his darker, less playful mode," our reviewer, Joyce Carol Oates, wrote here. MR. SPLITFOOT, by Samantha Hunt. (Mariner, $14.95.) Ruth and Nat, two orphans in a foster home headed by a religious fanatic, discover an ability to speak to the dead; when a con man learns of their talent, he's eager to profit from it. In alternating chapters, the story jumps to the present day, when Ruth - who has become eerily mute - lures her pregnant niece on a journey by foot across New York State. SUDDEN DEATH, byÁIvaro Enrigue. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Riverhead, $16.) In a novel bursting with historical figures - Galileo, Anne Boleyn, Caravaggio - 16th-century monks imbue tennis matches with spiritual import; a French executioner is himself executed; and Spanish conquistadors carry out their bloody siege of Mexico, a merger of civilizations with "planetary aftershocks."D

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This collection gathers together many of Pulitzer-winner Dillard's best-known writings, drawn from eight of her books, as well as one piece previously published in Harper's Magazine. After witnessing a total eclipse early one morning, Dillard meditates on the human awe at, and wariness of, natural spectacle: "From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home." Without being awake and attentive, Dillard warns, we'll miss the wondrous details of the world around us and the nuances of our own lives: "I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will." On writing, Dillard declares: "Don't hoard what seems good for another book... anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you." Fans of Dillard will find nothing new, but this collection serves as a bracing introduction for readers unfamiliar with her work. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

This book, a writerly mashup of Dillard's best work, samples from an oeuvre 40 years in the making. Representative selections old and new span the author's whole career but primarily draw from her Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Teaching a Stone To Talk (1982), and stunning memoir An American Childhood (1987). Breakthrough pieces-"Total Eclipse," "Seeing"-spotlight her metaphysical and nature-focused subject matter, distinctive meditative style, and point of view. Ever a keen observer, Dillard hooks readers with unusual, often haunting, and yet precisely vivid descriptions. VERDICT This collection is an excellent entry point into Dillard's writing and would especially appeal to new readers, although Dillard devotees will also enjoy this kaleidoscopic retrospective, this new way of "seeing" her prose. That said, it will only whet their appetites, leave them hungering for and searching for her complete works. [See Prepub Alert, 9/14/15.]-Meagan Lacy, Guttman Community Coll., CUNY © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A collection of essays that serve as a solid introduction to a writer blessed with an all-consuming consciousness steeped in both faith and science. Over the span of a 40-year career, Dillard has written memoirs (An American Childhood, 1987, etc.) and novels (The Maytrees, 2007, etc.), but she is perhaps best known for her nonfiction narratives, which are personal and deeply aware. "It's all a matter of keeping my eyes open" she writes in an essay excerpted here from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the 1975 Pulitzer Prize winner that made her a literary celebrity at the age of 29. "Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children. Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot?" Over the four decades since the publication of Pilgrim, the author's vision has only sharpened. Seeing a trapped deer ("The Deer at Providencia") raises the eternal question of suffering. In "The Weasel," Dillard contrasts an encounter between a thinking animal and a reactive one. She's at her best when seeing the world in a grain of sand, or billions of them; the essay "Sand" is also about prehistoric life and the Jesuit priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who devoted his life to uncovering it. A similar juxtaposition of micro and macro is at work in "An Expedition to the Pole," in which Dillard compares dual approaches to the infinite: Arctic exploration and Catholic Mass. The author gives insight into her own craft in her advice to younger writers: don't bank your fire. "Don't hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or another book; give it, give it all, give it now," she writes. From the vantage point of her 70th year, this collection is a testament to a lifetime of doing just that. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.