Kirjahaku

A stunning collection of Annie Dillard's most popular books in one volume.

"She has a strange and wonderful mind, and the ability to speak it with enduring grace." - The New Yorker"A stand up ecstatic. . . . Like all great writers, she is fresh, jarring, passionately dedicated to her subject." -- Threepenny ReviewFrom one of America's most beloved writers, a collection of her own work - from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Holy the Firm, An American Childhood, and The Living - now in paperback. A lovely introduction to the prolific Annie Dillard's Pulitzer Prize-winning oeuvre, this sampler demonstrates Dillard's wide breadth of writing from the most minute observations to profound meditations on God in everyday life.

"An American Childhood more than takes the reader's breath away. It consumes you as you consume it, so that, when you have put down this book, you're a different person, one who has virtually experienced another childhood." -- Chicago TribuneA book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s and 60s. Dedicated to her parents--from whom she learned a love of language and the importance of following your deepest passions--Dillard's brilliant memoir will resonate with anyone who has ever recalled with longing playing baseball on an endless summer afternoon, caring for a pristine rock collection, or knowing in your heart that a book was written just for you.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer shares her sharply observed, keenly felt encounters with the natural world--in landscapes of Eastern woods and farmlands, the Pacific Northwest coast, and tropical islands and rivers

" This] is a book of great richness, beauty and power and thus very difficult to do justice to in a brief review. . . . The violence is sometimes unbearable, the language rarely less than superb. Dillard's description of the moth's death makes Virginia Woolf's go dim and Edwardian. . . . Nature seen so clear and hard that the eyes tear. . . . A rare and precious book." -- Frederick Buechner, New York Times Book ReviewA profound book about the natural world--both its beauty and its cruelty--from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie DillardIn 1975 Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound, in a wooden room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider, and one person." For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice, death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firm, she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls "the hard things--rock mountain and salt sea," she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire.Here is a lyrical gift to any reader who has ever wondered how best to live with grace and wonder in the natural world.

"Living by Fiction is written for--and dedicated to--people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, GarcÍ a MÁ rquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows why fiction "matters" and how it can reveal more of the modern world and modern thinking than all the academic sciences combined. Like Joyce Cary's "Art and Reality," this is a book by a writer on the issues raised by the art of literature. "Readers of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" and "Holy the Firm" will recognize Dillard's vivid writing, her humor, and the lively way in which she tackles the urgent questions of meaning in experience itself.

This New York Times bestselling novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard is a mesmerizing evocation of life in the Pacific Northwest during the last decades of the 19th century.

" In] this anthology of well-chosen excerpts by a satisfyingly diverse group of writers....the truth of their lives shines from every beautifully, often courageously composed page."-- Booklist"Packed with superb writing." -- New York NewsdayModern American Memoirs is a sampling from 35 quintessential 20th century memoirs, including contributions from Margaret Mead, Malcolm X, Maxine Hong Kingston, Loren Eisely, and Zora Neale Hurston. Supremely written and excellent examples of the art of biography, these excerpts present a beautifully wide range of American life.

A collection of essays on the natural world during a year spent in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia reflects the author's interactions with her wilderness surroundings. Reader's Guide available. Winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize. Reissue. 25,000 first printing.

"Brilliant. . . . A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love." -- New York Times"In her elegant, sophisticated prose, Dillard tells a tale of intimacy, loss and extraordinary friendship and maturity against a background of nature in its glorious color and caprice. The Maytrees is an intelligent, exquisite novel." -- The Washington TimesToby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. He hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems. In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. When their son Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk.In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. She presents nature's vastness and nearness. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Dillard's original body of work.

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.

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."

Best known for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative on nature and eternity, Annie Dillard writes fiction and nonfiction, as well as poetry, that explore abstract and sensory phenomena, the role of the artist in society and the creative process. The poems gathered in Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, first published in 1974, show us that the concerns of the author have not changed since she was in her twenties. Hers is a poetry of fact - of science and nature, eternity and time, and how we know what we know. Often commended for their precise imagery, these poems speak of the love between people, storytelling and poetry's form.

What can we know, and what remains beyond our reach?In 1979, Annie Dillard witnessed the solar eclipse in Yakima, Washington. In Total Eclipse, this celestial event becomes a metaphysical reckoning. With lyrical precision and eerie clarity, Dillard evokes the strangeness of the shifting sky and the psychic dislocation that descends with the shadow.The quiet yet epic unravelling of the familiar becomes revelation: a rupture in time, a confrontation with mortality and a brush with the sublime. Juxtaposing the cosmic and the mundane, Total Eclipse meditates on the limits of perception and language, entering the surreal intensity of the phenomenon to emerge with the brief, blazing clarity offered by darkness.

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.

In Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard fixes her entrancing gaze and powerful sense of wonder on the natural world. Whether watching a sublime lunar eclipse or locking eyes with a wild weasel, Dillard captures the grand and miniature miracles of our universe. Annie Dillard is one of the most respected and influential figures in contemporary non-fiction and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. With Teaching a Stone to Talk, she illuminates the world around us with a new and glowing light.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has continued to change people's lives for over thirty years. A passionate and poetic reflection on the mystery of creation with its beauty on the one hand and cruelty on the other, it has become a modern American literary classic in the tradition of Thoreau. Living in solitude in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Roanoke, Virginia, and observing the changing seasons, the flora and fauna, the author reflects on the nature of creation and of the God who set it in motion. Whether the images are cruel or lovely, the language is memorably beautiful and poetic, and insistently celebratory. Just pay attention, Dillard urges throughout, and you will find yourself 'sailing headlong and breathless under the gale force of the spirit'.