Reader Score
82%
82% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 8 reviews on
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.
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.
Michael Marshall Smith is a novelist and screenwriter.
Reading Annie Dillard’s collection of essays, THE ABUNDANCE. Dear lord her prose is good. Every sentence is perfect. Every single one. So perfect it’s as if some ineffable chicken-shaped word god laid them like eggs, and yet none trap you: all gracefully hand you on to the next. https://t.co/cYkCtIcaiU
Cofounder & CEO of @ModernTreasury (YC S18). Views are my own. Some are not even views. Some are just tweets. Or, um, maybe, xeets? https://t.co/miBKt3jepk
Leslie Berlin’s “Troublemakers” and Annie Dillard’s “The Abundance” were my picks for this list. Both great reads - check those and the rest below out sometime! https://twitter.com/moderntreasury/status/1508515547847090178