Abundance

Annie Dillard has spent a lifetime examining the world around her with eyes wide open, drinking in all things intensely and relentlessly. Whether observing a sublime lunar eclipse or a moth consumed in a candle flame, the trembling of lily pads on a pond or hundreds of red-winged blackbirds taking flight, Dillard's awe at the fragility of the natural world rejuvenates and inspires pleasure and heartache. Precise in language and deeply meditative in spirit, this is a landmark collection from one of America's masters.

What stays longest with the reader is the magnesium-flare intensity of her prose and her invincible joy at being alive, For Annie Dillard there's no realm of knowledge without its accompanying gasp of wonder; she has a mystic's appreciation of the glory and plurality of the world, and a gift for communicating astonishment . . . Dillard is triumphantly awake, and these essays are magnificent and dramatic, illuminating and inspirational. Read them; they brim with abundance, Luminous, startling, mischievous . . . the memory is scalpel bright, and the imagination alchemical, Annie Dillard is a brilliant American poet, novelist and essayist, a kind of philosophical nature writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir . . . [The Abundance] grips you with a real and painful sense of the natural world in all its mystery and cruelty, Annie Dillard's books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event

Annie Dillard was born in 1945 in Pennsylvania. She is a much-celebrated poet, novelist and essayist and author of thirteen books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was awarded the 2014 National Humanities Medal for her work deepening the understanding of the human experience. www.anniedillard.com