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Original Essays | October 17, 2009

Jessica Maxwell: IMG God's Tea Party

13 comments By Jessica Maxwell

My Catholic friend tilted her teacup like a fortune-teller. "You know," she said, "I think people who don't have God in their lives are like people... Continue »
  1. $17.50 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

    Roll around Heaven: An All-True Accidental Spiritual Adventure

    Jessica Maxwell

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

by Annie Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Cover

ISBN13: 9780060915452
ISBN10: 0060915455
Condition: Standard
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Out of Print

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

An exhilarating meditation on nature and its seasons — a personal narrative highlighting one year's exploration on foot in the author's own neighborhood in Tinker Creek, Virginia. In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays 'King of the Meadow' with a field of grasshoppers.

Review:

"The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. A reader's heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled...There is an ambition about her book that I like...It is the ambition to feel."(-- Eudora Welty, New York Times Book Review)

Synopsis:

Chapter 1. Heaven and Earth in Jest
Chapter 2. Seeing
Chapter 3. Winter
Chapter 4. The Fixed
Chapter 5. Untying the Knot
Chapter 6. The Present
Chapter 7. Spring
Chapter 8. Intricacy
Chapter 9. Flood
Chapter 10. Fecundity
Chapter 11. Stalking
Chapter 12. Nightwatch
Chapter 13. The Horns of the Altar
Chapter 14. Northing
Chapter 15. The Waters of Separation
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About the Author

Annie Dillard is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as well as An American Childhood, The Living and Mornings Like This 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. Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia. After living for five years in the Pacific Northwest, she returned to the East Coast, where she lives with her family.
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What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:
tessilou41, October 5, 2008 (view all comments by tessilou41)
This is one of the most captivating and lovely books I've ever read. I came across it in 1990 when a friend was thinning out her books before a move, and she gave it to me. Since then, including several moves of my own -- the last one to Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico -- I have held on to this book, given copies to friends as gifts, and recommended it to others. I try to re-read it at least every year or so.
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Jane Churchon, September 14, 2008 (view all comments by Jane Churchon)
I don't like nature writing and Annie Dillard sold me on it, or at least her brand of nature writing.

Dillard is a poet, and from the first page, in which she uses iambic pantameter and internal rhyme to tell a story, she establishes her power over the language. SHe doesn't flaunt this--only readers looking for her crafts skill and twists would find them--but she uses them to shape a narrative about topics as varied as floods, bugs that suck the frog body from the frog skin, snakes, goldfish, the actual topography of land, preying mantis sex and feeding habits (one and the same) and the joy of each season.

Structured like Thoreau's Walden Pond, Dillard freely borrows from his beginning, and makes the book her own. Dense, whimsical and fact based, she wrote this from years of her own notes about books she'd read. She talks about blindness and sight, survival and adaptation, shelter and exposure. All while making puns or pouring poetry onto words that would otherwise remain scientific and dull.

Read this book for a brain exercise and for the excursion it provides into rural Virginia and the greater world beyond, in the animal and plant kingdom of our planet.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780060915452
Author:
Dillard, Annie
Publisher:
HarperPerennial
Location:
New York :
Subject:
Nature
Subject:
Essays
Copyright:
1988
Edition Description:
1st Perennial library ed.
Series Volume:
82(11.103)
Publication Date:
1988
Binding:
Trade Paper
Illustrations:
Y
Pages:
271 p.
Dimensions:
7.98x5.32x.70 in. .45 lbs.
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