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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

by Annie Dillard

ISBN13: 9780060915452
ISBN10: 0060915455
Condition: Standard
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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.

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

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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: Baggsie, January 3, 2013 (view all comments by Baggsie)
After a near-death experience due to pneumonia at age 25, Dillard took a year to live alone in the Virginia backwoods and she chronicles her experience, season by season, in this book. Reading this book was like balm for my soul. I took months reading it, and I savored every sentence. Dillard described nature on a micro and macro level with intensity and clarity, while weaving in references to literature and Scripture and culture and throwing in some factoids to boot. This book is, in a word, Profound. It is a book I hope to always have on hand.
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: RobinWren217, September 5, 2011 (view all comments by RobinWren217)
Dillard's lovely book, first published more than 35 years ago, can rightly be called a classic. It remains even now one of the most beautiful works in a genre that includes Thoreau and Aldo Leopold. From PILGRIM: "We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence. . . . 'Seems like we're just set down here,' a woman said to me recently, 'and don't nobody know why.'" Dillard at the time did not call herself a naturalist but an observer. Oh, but Lord, what an observer, and what a writer! Before we were all learning to value the present, she was right there in it, up close, watching. Time and its passage seemed to meant nothing to her, not if Lethocerus, the giant waterbug, happened to catch her attention as it slurped down a soup of frog. I admit that I was reluctant to read PILGRIM, I had heard too many paeans to Dillard's book and as an amateur naturalist myself was certain that it would either disappoint or offend with what in those days (the 1970s) I feared would be "hippy-dippy" nonsense. I was wrong, completely wrong. Read the book. If the writer was young, she was wise beyond her years, but more important, she was not trying to say anything, only to look and to watch and to ask questions. She did it brilliantly, with writing that has not lost any of its power or beauty over time.
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: 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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Product Details

ISBN:: 9780060915452
Author:: Dillard, Annie
Publisher:: HarperPerennial
Location:: New York :
Subject:: Nature
Subject:: Essays
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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