The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New
Written by Annie Dillard
Narrated by Susan Ericksen
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author
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 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.
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, The Living and The Maytrees. 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.
More audiobooks from Annie Dillard
The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Maytrees Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Living Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An American Childhood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to The Abundance
Related audiobooks
Crossing Open Ground Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Essays After Eighty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Field Notes: The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dakota: A Spiritual Geography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eight Whopping Lies: And Other Stories of Bruised Grace Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wilderness Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Light Action In the Caribbean: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Givenness of Things: Essays Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsErosion: Essays of Undoing Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Clear Springs: A Family Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vesper Flights Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Year by the Sea: Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Speaking of Faith Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wild Heart: The Politics Of Place Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWaterlog: A Swimmers Journey Through Britain Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When I Was a Child: A "When I Was a Child I Read Books" Essay Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nature Near Home and Other Papers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Maine Woods Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Nature For You
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: My Year of Psychedelics: Lessons on Better Living Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Cactus Jack: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Uncertain Sea: Fear is everywhere. Embrace it. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shelter: A Love Letter to Trees Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Venom Doc: The Edgiest, Darkest, Strangest Natural History Memoir Ever Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Inner Life of Animals: Love, Grief, and Compassion: Surprising Observations of a Hidden World Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Coffee: A Sustainable Guide to Nootropics, Adaptogens, and Mushrooms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5High Tide in Tucson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Underland: A Deep Time Journey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Animals Strike Curious Poses Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life on Earth Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for The Abundance
10 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Annie Dillard makes you look at everything closer. After reading the Abundance, it'll be hard not to graze your fingers on passing trees, listen in as birds speak to one another. In the technology age, we need her voice, one who helps us look from our devices and into the wood.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I've always loved Annie Dillard's work -- she is a powerful and echoing writer, and we follow her string of consciousness along whatever path she chooses to tread. This is a very nice collection of her work. It's a little odd, because somehow I thought there would be new work here, or that it would be mostly new work, and it isn't. It's really lovely excerpts of older work and a few essays on youth that I hadn't seen before. It's basically a best-of reader in handy format. Reading it on the bus got me into one of the most pleasant unsolicited conversations I've had lately, so there's that, too. It's a book, and a siren song to writers.
Advanced readers copy provided by Edelweiss. - Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I was so enjoying this book. The writing is gorgeous, and I found myself copying long passages down to re read and savour. Then a couple of things started to concern me- the authors dispassionate description of a suffering deer, her self congratulatory tone regarding her mental toughness as a meat eater. Then I got to a paragraph where, in an attempt to scare away some steer blocking her access to a river, she yells scary things at them. Her final submission is “SWEDISH MEATBALLS”, at which point they run away. Shortly after that point, I had to stop reading the book. No matter how hard I tried, I read mean spiritedness against animals in her tone, at the same time that she wrote mind bogglingly beautiful passages around her appreciation of nature in all its glory.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anne Dillard is very different to most people. When they look at the world around them they only see a fraction of what is actually there, she relentlessly absorbs every detail of the place and experience. But her true skill lies in taking what she has seen and writing about it with tight, and sharp prose. In this new collection, Dillard writes about subjects as wide-ranging and diverse as solar eclipses, the family jokes, the bundle of energy that is the weasel, as well as essays on skin, tsunamis and about the Victorian expeditions to the North Pole.
Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Her sense of fascination and wonder at the things she sees permeates the book with all the subjects she talks about, making this a wonderful thing to read. My favourite essay was the one titled ‘For The Time Being’, about that material that most do not consider, sand. In her unique way, we find out how many grains of sand are created every moment, how it flows with water down to the sea before transforming back to rock over countless millennia. We learn that the sharpest items are not always metal and that they took hundreds of small blows to form these exquisite stone implements. This is the second book of Dillard’s that I have read now and I am finding that I am liking her writing more and more. Her penetrating gaze at the world around is brilliantly complemented by her precise prose. Whilst I realise that some of these have been published before, this is a fine introduction to her work who hasn’t read anything of her work before. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is basically an Annie Dillard Reader, and I'd already read virtually everything in the collection. A massive Dillard fan, I would ding it a star for offering little new, but I just love the excerpts too much. I will admit, however, that new-to-Dillard readers should start with a full, other book, and fellow old-to-Dillard readers might be disappointed in the retread.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Annie Dillard's essay are my pause button, or my reset button. She makes me stop and think, look at what's around me, wonder at the everyday things in my life. I own all her books and whenever I get frustrated at the many things, because of my health, that I can no longer do, I read a few. Whether it is a solar eclipse, badgers, church music or the many things around us she has an interesting or amusing way of describing these things. I don't read more than a few in one sitting because they lose their sense of wonder that way. These are meant to savor, to read slowly, to stop and think, look and learn. She covers so many different subjects, notices so many different things, some are funny, such as the one where she visits Disneyland with a group of Chinese. I just hope she keeps writing, so I can keep reading her amazing insights.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I love Dillard's originality and boldness to be wildly unconventional