The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

by Annie Dillard Narrated by Derek Perkins, Maggi-Meg Reed

Overview

In recognition of her 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 Pulitzer-Prize winning 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.

Including such classic essays as ""Total Eclipse,"" ""A Writer in the World"" and ""On Foot in Virginia's Roanoke Valley,"" The Abundance exquisitely showcases Annie Dillard's enigmatic, enduring genius, as Dillard herself wishes it to be marked.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Donovan Hohn

It's a reviewer's commonplace to praise a writer's prose as hallucinogenic, but in Dillard's case, the adjective fits: Her essays have been known to induce in their users visions of dreamlike intensity…[Thoreau's] Walden is auroral, as if written by dawn's light. The Abundance is crepuscular. Darkness keeps falling across the page. Readers seeking pretty glimpses of heaven on earth will find little comfort here. Humor, yes. And a fair portion of the beautiful and the sublime. A great deal of the sublime. But little comfort…The title of The Abundance is not misleading in the slightest. What I mostly felt, reading it, was gratitude for the bounty.

Kirkus Reviews

2016-01-10
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172961823
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/11/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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