Annie Dillard

Here, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings.

Expeditions and Encounters

Teaching a Stone to Talk

Annie Dillard has written eleven books, including the memoir of her parents, An American Childhood; the Northwest pioneer epic The Living; and the nonfiction narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A gregarious recluse, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Writing Life

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.

Narrative Essays Old and New

The Abundance

An American Childhood is the electrifying memoir of the wide-eyed and unconventional upbringing that influenced the lifetime love of nature and the stunning writing career of Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard. From her mother's boundless energy to her father's low-budget horror movies, jokes and lonesome river trips down to New Orleans to get away, the events of Dillard's 1950s Pittsburgh childhood loom larger than life. An American Childhood fizzes with the playful observations and sparkling prose of this American master, illuminating the seemingly ordinary and yet always thrilling, dizzying moments of a childhood and adolescence lived fearlessly.

An American Childhood

Living by Fiction is written for--and dedicated to--people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, García Márquez, 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.

Living by Fiction

A Novel

The Maytrees

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'.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Sharing a simple life with his wife and young son in the post-war artist community of his childhood, free-thinking poet Toby Maytree is aided with child-care responsibilities by close friend Deary, who years later comes between Toby and his wife. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. 100,000 first printing.

C. S. Lewis

Thomas Merton

Henri J. M. Nouwen

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A collection of spiritual readings by various authors for the Advent and Christmas season.

Readings for Advent and Christmas

Watch for the Light

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

The Writing Life, An American Childhood, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Three by Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard -- "one of the most distinctive voices in American letters today" (Boston Globe) -- collects her favorite selections from her own writings in this compact volume. A perfect introduction to one of America's most acclaimed and bestselling authors.

An Annie Dillard Reader

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; An American Childhood; The Writing Life

Celebrate re-publication of this Pulitzer Prize-winning author's first book.

Poems

Tickets for a Prayer Wheel

Winner of the New England Book Show Award It’s been a pilgrimage for Annie Dillard: from Tinker Creek to the Galapagos Islands, the high Arctic, the Pacific Northwest, the Amazon Jungle—and now, China. This informative narrative is full of fascinating people: Chinese people, mostly writers, who encounter American writers in various bizarre circumstances in both China and the U.S. There is a toasting scene at a Chinese banquet; a portrait of a bitter, flirtatious diplomat at a dance hall; a formal meeting with Chinese writers; a conversation with an American businessman in a hotel lobby; an evening with long-suffering Chinese intellectuals in their house; a scene in the Beijing foreigners’ compound with an excited European journalist; and a scene of unwarranted hilarity at the Beijing Library. In the U.S., there is Allen Ginsberg having a bewildering conversation in Disneyland with a Chinese journalist; there is the lovely and controversial writer Zhang Jie suiting abrupt mood changes to a variety of actions; and there is the fiercely spirited Jiange Zilong singing in a Connecticut dining room, eyes closed. These are real stories told with a warm and lively humor, with a keen eye for paradox, and with fresh insight into the human drama.

Encounters with Chinese Writers

Susan Ericksen

Abundance, The

هیچ چیز آن‌جا نیست

In 1940s Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, poet Toby Maytree falls in love with Lou Bigelow at first sight. His slow courtship gradually wins her over, and so begins a love story that lasts decades. But when a friend comes between them, they must each renegotiate what it means to love.

In Mornings Like This, Annie Dillard extracts and rearranges sentences from old--and often odd--books, and composes ironic poems--some serious, some light--on the heartfelt themes of love, nature, nostalgia, and death. Clever, original, sometimes humorous, and often profound, this collection is sure to charm her fans, both old and new.

Found Poems

Mornings Like This

Viure escrivint

In Modern American Memoirs, two very discerning writers and readers have selected samples from 35 of the finest memoirs written in this century, including contributions by such diverse writers as Margaret Mead, Malcolm X, Maxine Hong Kingston, Loren Eisely, and Zora Neale Hurston. Chosen for their value as excellent examples of the art of biography as well as for their superb writing, the excerpts present a broad range of American life, and offer vivid insight into the real-life events that shaped their authors. Here, readers can learn about the time when Harry Crews, playing as a boy, fell into a vat of boiling water with a dead hog; Chris Offutt joined the circus and watched a tattooed woman swallow a fluorescent light; and Frank Conroy practiced yo-yo tricks.

Annie Dillard

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