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" - * New Statesman, 'Best Books of 2016' *
"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" - * Guardian *
"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" - * Sunday Times *
"Annie Dillard is one of those people who seem to be more fully alive than most of us, more nearly wide-awake than human beings generally get to be" - * New York Times *
"Few writers evoke better the emotion of awe and few have ever conveyed more graphically the weight of silence, the force of the immaterial" - * Boston Globe *
"Annie Dillard is, was, and always will be the very best at describing the landscapes in which we find ourselves" - * Star Tribune (Minneapolis) *
"This book, a writerly mashup of Dillard's best work, samples from an oeuvre forty years in the making. Ever a keen observer, Dillard hooks readers with unusual, often haunting, and yet precisely vivid descriptions. This collection is an excellent entry point into Dillard's writing and would especially appeal to new readers, although Dillard devotees will also enjoy this kaleidoscopic retrospective, this new way of 'seeing' her prose. That said, it will only whet their appetites, leave them hungering for and searching for her complete works" - * Library Journal *
"Annie Dillard has a tendency to write the literary equivalent of an earworm. She gets stuck in your head. The Abundance is a thoughtful introduction to her work - Annie Dillard 101. It's a great place to start" - * Houston Chronicle *
"Here is a distillation of a strange, powerful sensibility, unique in contemporary American letters . . . Annie Dillard is a brilliant and necessary writer who forces upon us the knowledge that we are not living as we should" - * Chicago Tribune *
"[S]he is, flagrantly, a consciousness - an abstract, all-encompassing energy field that inhabits a given piece of writing the way sunlight clings to a rock: delicately but with absolute force, always leaving a shadow behind. This is an essential part of what it means to be human, this shifting between the transcendent self and the contingent world, the ecstasy and the dental bill. We all do some version of it, all the time. But Dillard does it more insistently" - * The St Louis Post Dispatch *
"An adventure. It is like learning to read all over again. It is a reminder to see - to look and listen - more closely than ever before . . . To read Annie Dillard's latest collection of essays is to be a student of language and a student of the world - to look at everything, even the tiniest moments, with perpetual wonder" - * Washington Independent Review of Books *
"Arresting, poetic and challenging . . . The Abundance grips and pinions the heart" - * Country Life *