The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

Written by Annie Dillard

Narrated by Derek Perkins and Maggi-Meg Reed

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. With a foreword by Geoff Dyer.

“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 foreword 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9780063139800

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.

Reviews for The Abundance

[wvlibrarydude · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A collection of Dillard's writing. Beautiful. Poetic. Confusing. Filled with nature, grace, philosophy, and anything the author examines in her view of the universe. I don't think I will ever completely understand it all, but that doesn't prevent the reader from entering Dillard's world with pleasure and wonder.

[formerenglishteacher · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Annie Dillard’s essays require more attention than I gave to them while listening as I did my daily walk on the treadmill. My mind wandered, and when I would come back to the essay, I would have lost the train of thought Dillard was putting forth. The book is a group of selections from her previously published essays, so some of them were familiar to me. The essay about how sand is made is fascinating, but when she creates an analogy between that and a church service, I was lost. I enjoy essay, but this group of essays requires more attention than I gave it.

[treebeard_404 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The first half of this collection of excerpts was quite enjoyable. But then there were long sections from "A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek", which I have already read twice. Then the final section just got... weird. But I am going to check out Dillard's "An American Childhood" now.

[jennybeast · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'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.

[ccayne_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love Dillard's originality and boldness to be wildly unconventional

[porte01 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I 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.

[pdcread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Anne 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.

[nicholasjjordan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This 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.

[jaredorlando-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Annie 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.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Annie 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.